Father of first American killed in Afghanistan says he is ‘ashamed’ over US withdrawal crisis

Johnny ‘Mike’ Spann killed in prisoner uprising in northern Afghanistan in November 2001

The father of the first American service member killed in Afghanistan says he is “ashamed” of the US withdrawal from the country.

Johnny “Mike” Spann was killed during a Taliban prisoner-uprising in northern Afghanistan in November 2001.

The 32-year-old CIA paramilitary officer, who had two young daughters and an infant son, had volunteered for deployment to the country in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Mr Spann, a former Marine, was interviewing Taliban prisoners at a fort near Mazar-e Sharif on 25 November 2001, when hundreds of them staged a violent uprising.

He was among 2,448 American service members killed in Afghanistan from 11 September 2001 to April 2021.

Mr Spann’s father, also called Johnny Spann, told The Washington Post he did not oppose US troops leaving Afghanistan, but believed it was happening at the wrong time.

“I’m very frustrated and ashamed of the way we’re exiting Afghanistan,” he told the newspaper.

CIA officer Johnny "Mike" Spann, 32, who entered the Marine Corps and then joined the CIA in June 1999 in an undated family photo. Spann is the first American known to be killed in combat in Afghanistan. (Getty Images)

Mr Spann, 73, says he watched in horror as desperate Afghans tried to climb onboard a US C-17 cargo plane as it left the country earlier this week.

“We don’t seem to learn from our mistakes,” said the elder Mr Spann, a supporter of one-term president Donald Trump, as he added that the country had been “handed over to the Taliban”.

“We could not have done the things that we did as a country without those Afghans. We made promises to them – and we know what’s going to happen to them,” he said.

Mr Spann, who is from Alabama, said that it was “gut-wrenching” for him to think of the death of his son and other Americans and Afghans being “sort of brushed under thee rug and walked away from” as the Taliban swept back into power.

But he added that the chaotic scenes in Kabul proved to him that his son actually “died for a good cause”.

“They did what they were supposed to do, we did what we were supposed to do,” he said.

“I’m proud of Mike and his partners, the people he went there with; I’m so proud of them. I don’t want them to think everything they did was in vain. For 20 years, they kept us safe.”