CV NEWS FEED // Emails show that the Pentagon was preoccupied with climate policies during the days of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that left thousands of Americans and Afghan allies trapped and at the mercy of the Taliban.
In “the two weeks between the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, 2021, and the final U.S. military flight out of Afghanistan on August 30, Pentagon officials were scrambling with the White House to finalize the Department of Defense Climate Adaptation Plan,” wrote The Daily Wire’s Brent Scher on Wednesday.
The Daily Wire reported that they were able to access email communications showing that the priorities of the Biden administration’s Department of Defense in late August 2021 had to do with combatting the “climate crisis.”
During the same period, the administration led a now-infamous withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. As a result of numerous missteps on the part of military leaders under the direction of President Biden, the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan for the first since the United States first sent troops there in 2001.
This document, as Scher explained, “declares climate change a major national security risk.”
Scher reported that the emails
indicate frustration from climate change-focused Pentagon officials at the difficulty of getting the plan signed — but that ultimately their determination to focus on climate change even during the Afghanistan withdrawal paid off. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin signed the climate initiative on September 1, just six days after 13 Americans were killed by a Taliban suicide bomber.
James Fitzpatrick, the Director of the Center to Advance Security in America (CASA), obtained the emails and provided them to The Daily Wire.
“While the Biden Administration was in the middle of a disastrous and deadly Afghanistan withdrawal,” said Fitzpatrick, “our top military leaders were being hounded by DoD climate activists to fast track a plan to transform the Department by forcing politically charged climate change discussions into every decision the DoD makes.”
According to his organization’s website, Fitzpatrick “is an Army Veteran and currently serves as an Officer in the U.S. Army Reserve as a Captain in the Judge Advocate General Corps. In 2018, he deployed to Kuwait and Jordan with the 28th Infantry Division of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.”
CASA describes itself as a
nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the safety and security of the American people. We educate and inform them about the actions of their government and its officials that impact their safety; peace and security; democracy, civil rights, and civil liberties; and privacy.
Scher also reported that according to the emails, two senior Pentagon officials were more “frustrated” about the Secretary of Defense not signing the “Climate Adaption Plan” than they were about the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan, where countless American servicemen and civilians still were. He wrote:
The frustration was not that the mission in Afghanistan had devolved into a full-fledged crisis with people falling off planes as they departed the airport, nearly 200 murdered by terrorists as they flooded the airport in hopes of evacuation, and a botched military drone strike that killed civilians rather than terrorist targets. It was that Austin had failed to sign the climate plan.
Last week, CatholicVote reported how the Biden administration’s COVID policies also negatively impacted the U.S. military’s disastrous withdrawal:
Because some of the Marines were stationed at the embassy in Kabul, the whole unit was subject to the State Department’s policies, which mandated masking and vaccination.
As a result, countless unvaccinated soldiers were barred from going on missions leading up to and during the evacuation of Kabul.
“The rule’s only accomplishment was to deprive various Marine QRF units in Kabul of critical manpower and experience when it mattered most,” the report said, listing several examples of squad leaders that were barred from carrying out their mission for being unvaccinated.
“It seems pretty clear to me,” said one soldier, “that making those decisions because of a [expletive] COVID vaccine directly impacted the lives of people on the ground.”
