Vice President Kamala Harris referred to the hurried evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, as a “successful drawdown.”
Harris spoke to reporters in Singapore about the “successful drawdown of the embassy” in Kabul, touting the fact that it had transpired “without any American casualties.” (RELATED: ‘We Are Stranded’: Government Worker Says Family Is ‘Trapped,’ Can’t Get To Kabul Airport Without Being Beaten And Whipped)
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Kamala Harris brags about the “successful drawdown of the embassy” when asked about the situation in Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/OUo0xbd6Rc
— The First (@TheFirstonTV) August 23, 2021
“We have seen a successful drawdown of the embassy and thankfully without any American casualties,” Harris said. “We have seen thousands of people who have been evacuated from the airport in Afghanistan where the United States military are doing very hard and difficult work.”
Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner took issue with the vice president’s characterization of the situation — and argued that while there were no reports of America fatalities, the claim that there were no American casualties was not accurate.
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“I just want to drill down a little bit on the word ‘casualty.’ That does not totally mean death. It means injuries and death. It would be only fatalities the way that she said it there,” Faulkner said, noting that there had been multiple reports of Americans sustaining beatings en route to the airport.
“How do we know there have been U.S. casualties? Because the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told us Americans were being beaten on the way to checkpoints. That’s a casualty, that’s an injury,” Faulkner said. “But what she is talking about we believe is people who perished. We’ll hope that number stays at zero as far as it is reported.
Faulkner went on to say that Harris had not mentioned Afghanistan at all in a speech later that day despite it being billed as a “major foreign policy speech.”
Instead, Harris talked about how climate change could impact supply chains for Christmas gifts, saying, “If you want to have Christmas toys for your children it might now be the time to start buying them because the delay may be many, many months. The climate crisis is fueling a lot of this.”
