Congressman Peter Meijer on Why He Traveled to the Kabul Airport

W hen news broke that two members of Congress, Republican Peter Meijer of Michigan and Democrat Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, had secretly flown to Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul earlier this week, Biden-administration officials harshly condemned them.

“It’s as moronic as it is selfish,” a senior administration official told the Washington Post. “They’re taking seats away from Americans and at-risk Afghans — while putting our diplomats and service members at greater risk — so they can have a moment in front of the cameras.”

But Meijer and Moulton had not, in fact, taken seats away from any evacuees, as they pointed out in a joint statement issued Tuesday evening.

Meijer explained in an interview with National Review on Friday afternoon that the congressmen sat in jump seats within the crew area that were not going to be used by U.S. servicemembers and where evacuees were not allowed for security reasons.

Meijer said the original plan was to leave the country on a charter plane, but that they decided to leave as soon as empty seats opened up on a military flight because the Washington Post had become aware of their presence. “We were actually planning to not take any U.S. military [aircraft] out of there, but I think somebody in the Biden administration leaked our presence to the Washington Post,” Meijer says. “So we had to speed that [departure] up, but we made sure to wait until there was a plane that was flying out that had empty seats.”

Meijer says that he and Moulton “wanted to make sure that our presence was not made public while we were there, so that we didn’t have any chance of elevating the risk or threat profile to the base.”

Meijer and Moulton, both veterans of the Iraq War, went into Kabul hoping to extend the August 31 evacuation deadline, but they came away believing that the current agreement was preferable to breaking it. “We better understood how unstable and how tense that situation was and how dependent we were on the Taliban to provide force protection and coordination on the evacuation,” says Meijer. “That’s an absurd reality that was not lost on anyone who was there.”

But after the Taliban failed to stop a terror attack that killed 13 U.S. troops and more than 100 Afghan civilians, injuring many more, why not tell the Taliban the deal is off and U.S. forces are staying until the mission is complete? “Maybe the Taliban will acquiesce, or maybe they will start to assault our forces in large numbers, in which case our fatalities multiply rapidly, and our ability to actually get people to safety evaporates,” Meijer tells NR.

But if the Taliban decided to fight, Meijer said, “it would result in urban conflict in Kabul on a scale I think we’ve never seen. It would result in probably a siege of the airport, and it’s an airport where we could lose our lift capability with a single well-placed mortar round.”

Other members of Congress have called for U.S. forces to retake Bagram Air Base and stay until all Americans have been evacuated. Meijer remains convinced that the current agreement with the Taliban is the least-bad option, but he wishes the administration hadn’t abandoned it in the first place.

“We should have never abandoned Bagram until we got out as many people out as we could have, and we should have started that evacuation of loyal Afghan allies months ago,” Meijer says. Since April, he continues, “that’s what we were telling the administration to do — outlining exactly this nightmare scenario that has befallen us — and saying, ‘While we have time, get people out of there. Move heaven and earth to do it, because we won’t be able to do it if we run out of time.’”

“For final operations, [Bagram] would have been a lot more defensible,” says Meijer, who served as an intelligence adviser with the U.S. Army Reserve in Iraq. “It obviously would have required more people to defend it, but you’re talking about a much larger base that’s not in the middle of an urban area with multiple runways. So that would have been far more advantageous. If there had been an ability to have an enduring counterterrorism presence, Bagram would have been ideal for that.”

Meijer says that having been on the ground made clear to him just how vulnerable U.S. troops are to an attack — and just how selfless and courageous they are knowing the risks.

“It’s a chaotic situation,” he adds. “It was not a stable security situation, but those Marines, they know that. That’s what makes their sacrifice so selfless.”

“They gave their lives to keep that gate open to ensure that as many people who needed to be rescued could be rescued,” he says. “It is the most courageous and heroic actions that I have seen in my entire career.”