Former CIA Analyst on MSNBC: Biden’s Afghanistan Implosion ‘Worse Than Saigon’

 Former CIA analyst Matt Zeller told MSNBC on Monday he believed Afghanistan’s implosion was “worse than Saigon.”

Host Craig Melvin asked Zeller how interpreters who assisted the United States during its war in Afghanistan felt about the situation. Zeller was saved in 2013 by an Afghan interpreter who killed two Taliban terrorists approaching him from behind in a combat setting.

“They feel absolutely betrayed, and they should,” Zeller answered. Referring to National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who answered a question earlier in the day about the chaotic attempt to evacuate a handful of people by talking about the State Department’s helicopter policy, Zeller added, “We left them there to die. I can’t stand what Jake Sullivan said this morning. Why does he still have a job at this point? These people need to be evacuated. I don’t care if the president had bad choices. We told him this was going to happen months ago.

“We all told them as far back as April that this was going to happen, and they needed to start evacuating our Afghan wartime allies when we had troops and personnel in place, and the country had not yet collapsed to the Taliban,” Zeller added. “And the secretary of state goes on TV and says this is not a new Saigon? He’s right. It’s worse. It’s worse than Saigon. In Saigon, we got 130,000 people out in a week. We’ve been trying to conduct an Afghan evacuation now for the better part of a month, and we have barely moved 2,500 people.”

About 3,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan assisted in evacuating 500 Americans on Sunday, according to the Pentagon. Another 3,000 troops were en route to help as many as 20,000 additional Americans evacuate. Mobs of Afghan citizens have also thronged Hamid Karzai International Airport hoping in vain for an escape route.

“They need to take full responsibility for their failure to evacuate our Afghan wartime allies,” Zeller said. “We’ve have had more than enough time. They were warned this was going to happen. This failure is as much of our as it is a Taliban victory.”