Exclusive: How Covid protocol disrupted the Afghanistan withdrawal

The Biden administration’s Covid obsession interfered with the execution of the Afghanistan evacuation, just as it had with Special Immigrant Visa applicants’ evacuation planning. The administration’s Covid vaccination requirements deprived critical units of key personnel. The problem was especially acute for the Marines in 2/1. From April to October 2021, the battalion rotated in as the combat arms unit of the Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force — Crisis Response — Central Command (SPMAGTF-CR-CC). In classic military fashion, the task force has an eleven-word name but a straightforward mission: part of the battalion safeguards embassies in the region, and the other part serves as the region-wide “Oh, shit!” response team. Because the unit is tasked with securing embassies, however, the Marines must abide by the State Department’s rules. In early 2021, a CENTCOM report noted that military contractors in Afghanistan were largely focused on Covid response instead of operational planning. 

The State Department’s Covid rules from fall 2020 to summer 2021 were asinine. When the Marines from 2/1 showed up in Baghdad, their outgoing counterparts from 2nd Battallion, 5th Marines — who were also based at Camp Pendleton in southern California — warned them that “the diplomats are fucking stupid.” One of the officers from 2/5 told us, among other things, that embassy officials had required them to wear disposable masks whenever they left their barracks — including when they were in full kit, manning their posts outside the embassy in Baghdad’s sweltering summer heat. The masks quickly caused their eye protection to fog up, making it nearly impossible to see. Nevertheless, embassy employees were quick to reprimand any Marine who tried to sneak a few minutes without a pointless face cover while standing alone outside in the blazing sun. 

The State Department also required anyone who might have been exposed to Covid to quarantine for two weeks, including the Marines and members of the embassy’s diplomatic security staff. Needless to say, the men and women of 2/5 were not about to short staff their guard shifts by shutting perfectly healthy Marines into their rooms for two weeks because they might have encountered someone who later tested positive. When pressed to do “contact tracing” by embassy staff, the NCOs in 2/5 simply asked (or, more accurately, told) their Marines, “No one’s getting sick, right?” 

From a combat readiness standpoint, however, the State Department’s most damaging rule was its vaccine mandate, which it applied as stringently to Marines as it did to its own staff. The rule’s only accomplishment was to deprive various Marine QRF units in Kabul of critical manpower and experience when it mattered most. For example, the squad leader and both team leaders of one of the weapons platoon squads attached to Echo Company, 2/1 were not deployed because they were unvaccinated. A corporal became the acting squad leader and borrowed a rifleman from another squad to carry one of their automatic weapons. Likewise, a member of Ghost Company did not deploy “since he was unvaccinated,” we were told. He sat in the classified vault back in Jordan, monitoring intelligence reports, watching drone feeds and attempting to relay them to Kabul in real time. 

Nearly every service member we spoke to mentioned the absurdity of the State Department’s approach to combat evacuation. The mission was exhausting enough without their having to cover unfilled positions. One Marine dryly noted, “There were greater threats to life at the airfield than Covid.” Others emphasized that the mandate was pointless in any event because their mission required them to interact with thousands of unvaccinated Afghans on a daily basis. 

Unnecessary personnel shortages owing to nonsensical Covid requirements were a common problem across nearly every unit — units that were there to clean up Biden’s mess. The surgeon attached to one of the medical units at the airfield, for example, could not deploy because he, too, was unvaccinated. His unit had to use a lesser-trained individual in his place. In official terms, the surgeon would “support [the mission] from Bahrain. There was no clear explanation why the unvaccinated surgeon had been considered medically fit to deploy to Bahrain but not to accompany his unit to Kabul months later. 

Because the administration’s vaccine mandate didn’t formally go into effect until August 24, the 82nd Airborne made an eleventh-hour decision to ignore it. Combat effectiveness was the most important consideration, and it simply made no sense to leave some of their best soldiers behind. Even then, the uncertainty imposed by the mandate actively disrupted critical preparations at both the company and platoon levels. One of the platoons in Alpha Company 2/504 rearranged its organizational structure at least three times in the week before they went wheels up for Kabul, because the list of deployable paratroopers was constantly shifting. 

A soldier in the platoon said, “We didn’t know who was going or not — and, like, this is while we had already been called up and were packing out stuff. I became a squad leader for a little while as we were deploying, because somehow, I was the next man up.” A platoon leader in his sister company echoed those thoughts: “Once we knew our unvaxxed guys were coming, I was like, ‘OK, perfect. Now we have all the key people back where we need them.’ But at first it was kind of like, ‘Great, now we have to piecemeal together some squads and teams based on what we think is happening.’” Less than forty-eight hours before takeoff, they were still reshuffling, making it impossible to assign tasks to specific soldiers or to conduct rehearsals as cohesive units. 

The first soldier added, “It seems pretty clear to me that making those decisions because of a fucking Covid vaccine directly impacted the lives of people on the ground. I mean, that’s an easy connection to make.”

This is an exclusive excerpt from Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End by investigative reporter Jerry Dunleavy and former Army Captain and Afghanistan veteran James Hasson. Kabul draws on hundreds of hours of first-person interviews to unveil the fatal politics and bureaucracy that contributed to the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.