afghanistan. there is a huge difference between 6,015,000. what happened to these other americans. the situation with the special immigrant visa is even more disturbing. not counting the sivs that arrived before kabul s fall, you evacuated 705 of roughly 20,000 principle siv applicants. what happened to these people? this committee reached out to the department in april, may and june to help expedite siv processing. we asked that additional what additional authorities or resources you needed for months we received contradictory responses or no response at all. i ll take a minute to defend the state department. one of the problem was providing the records needed to validate the afghans who bravely helped our forces. the fact that d.o.d. didn t keep accurate records is irresponsible and a slap in the face to those who fought
alongside of us. obviously we want to talk to secretary austin about this. despite the enormous efforts of our troops and diplomats on the the ground, the preventible tragedy that unfolded at the airport in kabul was a disaster of leadership and of the administration s own making. not ome were you unable to ensure that americans had access to the airport, many were turned away prepetedly after braving taliban check points but americans outside of kabul had absolutely no chance of evacuation. green card holders and sivs should have been prioritized but there was no mechanism to get inside. it was an informal network of americans that helped get americans and afghans around the bureaucratic wall the administration set up at the airport. it should not have come to that. the administration has paying itself in the back for this evacuation is like an arsonist taking credit for saving people from the burning building he just set on fire. we know that the u.s. military and our diplomats can d
others, by may we have reduced the processing time by more than one year. even amid a covid surge in kabul, we continued to issue visas and we went from issuing you about 100 special immigrant visas per week in march to more than 1,000 per week in august when our evacuation and relocation effort began. that emergency evacuation was sparked by the collapse of the afghan security forces and government. throughout the year, we were constantly assessing the staying power and considering multiple scenarios. even the most pessimistic assessments does not predict that the government forces in kabul would collapse while u.s. forces remained. they were focused on what would happen after the united states withdraw from september on wards. as general milley, the chairman of the joint chief of staff said, nothing we saw indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.
effort, an isis-k attack killed 13 service members working the gates at hkai. our service members gave their lives so that others could continue to live theirs. in the end, we completed one of the biggest airlifts in history. with 124,000 people vaccevacuato safety and on august 31st in kabul, the military in afghanistan officially ended and a new diplomatic mission began. i want to acknowledge the more than two dozen countries that have helped with the relocation effort. some serving as transit hubs, some welcoming refugees for longer periods of time. and as the 9/11 report suggested, it is essential that we accelerate the appointment process for national security
lengthy process, 14 steps, multiple agencies involved. we work to try to stream line that. i think there is more work we d like to do going forward to do that. but the bottom line is we did significantly surge our resources to that particularly to the chief admission approval process, quad rupingle them and we went from 10 to 50 to now i believe 61 or 62 working on that stage of things. we doubled the resources we had in kabul. all in an effort to expedite and we did. we went if 100 to 1,000 visas a week. what was not anticipated was 11 days in the afghan government and the afghan military. let me ask you this, there has been numerous press reports about a new or refined process for the state department to lead efforts in coordination with the department of defense to work with outside groups to evacuate american citizens and allies left behind in afghanistan. could you tell us exactly what