In Absence of Orders

President Joe Biden complained in his August 31, 2021 announcement on completion of the withdrawal of U.S. Government presence from Afghanistan. He declared in that announcement that his administration had since March extended 19 offers of assistance, including financial assistance, to U.S. citizens seeking to evacuate from Afghanistan - yet despite that, thousands of citizens didn't respond. The administration's own published documents give an opposite account.
Biden State Department (DoS) documents tell that as of April 27; DoS informed U.S. citizens that it was cutting Embassy staff in Afghanistan "…due to increasing violence and threat reports in Kabul." Therefore, DoS would henceforth be curtailing uncertain degrees of services available to U.S. citizens in Afghanistan. Also, said U.S. citizens were repeatedly informed in public DoS travel advisories published from April 27 on; that they should have evacuation plans that "do not rely on the government" for assistance for evacuation from Afghanistan; and that the Kabul Embassy's ability to assist citizens was "extremely limited." The were told they were to fend for themselves.

The Taliban enjoyed escalating sweeping on the ground successes starting in May and precipitously gaining momentum gobbling up huge swathes of Afghanistan throughout the months of June; and especially even more so in July all the way up to the fall of Kabul. Pretending ignorance of that which was obvious and well known; the Biden administration held off evacuating U.S. citizens from the country until the day came (August 15) when control of Kabul was handed over to the Taliban. Large scale (as opposed to incidental) military airlift evacuation of U.S. citizens from Kabul only came after the Taliban takeover of the Afghan capitol.

The Biden administration resisted evacuating citizens beyond any reasonable point. Standing US Law mandates that the Biden administration was required to evacuate citizens before it evacuated the Kabul Embassy. The administration should therefore have begun evacuation processes at least in April before any removal of embassy staff "…due to increasing violence and threat reports in Kabul;"

But the administration had its own interesting peculiar reason for ignoring the law and holding back on evacuations. It had a secret it was hiding that prevented it from evacuating the thousands of U.S. citizens in Kabul who would eventually find themselves under the effective control of the Taliban insurgency on August 15, 2021.

And that secret; the secret of what the administration was hiding and why the administration held off civilian evacuations for so ridiculously long and in disregard for the law – is eventually revealed, albeit unwittingly, piece by piece in the combined testimony of Biden administration officials before Congress. And that secret is the cause and the reason why thousands of U.S. citizens ended up under Taliban control;

DoS claimed as civilian airlift evacuations out of Kabul began on the week of Aug. 18, 2021; that there were between 10,000 and 15,000 U.S. citizens wanting out of Afghanistan. 6,000 were lifted out by end of U.S withdrawal on Aug. 31. Dos Suddenly there were only about 100 citizens left behind. U.S. citizens' efforts soon smuggled more than that out in the next month or so. These groups are still working to get more out. Meanwhile the DoS has kept revising its numbers up or down; and up or down again. It's been a consistently changing numbers story with that team.

The administration's aforementioned secret is the cause of why thousands of U.S. citizens ended up under Taliban control; and why untold numbers of U.S. citizens are still trapped in the Taliban's Afghanistan even now at the end of 2021, the beginning of 2022.