Don’t forget Qatar’s role in bringing us 70,000 unvetted Afghan refugees

Last year, when the Biden administration undertook to remove the remaining American forces that had been bolstering the government and military of Afghanistan against the predations of the Taliban, it signaled the end of this country’s longest-running foreign war. Even for those of us who’d spent years arguing that ending that war was in the best interests of the United States, the chaotic and embarrassing withdrawal helmed by the White House was both a strategic and a humanitarian calamity.

But it was worse than that; Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal was also a threat to every American’s domestic security. By short-circuiting the verification process and distributing blank, printable visas, the Biden State Department set the stage for the entry into the United States of at least 100,000 Afghan refugees, many of them unvetted.

More than 70,000 of these refugees—without identification, or with background checks that are either incomplete or impossible to verify with any certainty—transited through Qatar, the Islamist Gulf emirate and Taliban strategic outpost that had spent years maneuvering itself into a place of influence in Democratic administrations.

Indeed, when Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, visits the White House today, it will be all smiles.

Even as U.S. policymakers have long argued that “moderate” Islamism is the antidote to violent Islamism, Qatar’s example serves as a rebuke. It hardly takes close examination to see that the Gulf emirate houses, sponsors and funds both violent and also so-called “moderate” Islamist groups and leaders, from the Taliban to Hamas to the Muslim Brotherhood and its long- and closely-affiliated Western pressure groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.