By Jim Geraghty
Monday, August 23, 2021
If you missed it over the weekend, for a
stretch of Friday and Saturday, one of the
email accounts that the U.S. State Department uses to process a type of asylum
visas for Afghans filled up, and messages to it started bouncing back to
senders.
I heard about the embarrassing technical
snafu from a longtime National Review
reader who spent years in Afghanistan working for a defense contractor. This
reader’s company worked on the construction of camps and garrisons, parts of
bases at Bagram and Kandahar, as well as several government buildings for the
Afghan military and police. His company employed thousands of Afghans, all of
whom are now targets of the Taliban.
Lest you doubt that Afghan construction
workers would be on the Taliban’s target list, the Taliban is issuing death
warrants for the relatives of translators who worked for the U.S. or coalition
forces. Anyone who the Taliban thinks “helped
the Americans” is marked for death — as well as their families.
My reader said emails stopped bouncing
back late Saturday, but that “I have limited faith in its stability. Sometimes
I feel like I’m shoveling P2 [asylum-visa] paperwork into a black hole. There
is no mechanism whereby they acknowledge your submission.”
Last night, the White House issued updated
numbers, declaring that “from 3 a.m. to 3 p.m., eight U.S. military flights — 7
C-17s and 1 C-130 — evacuated approximately 1,700 passengers from Hamid Karzai
International Airport. In addition, 39 coalition aircraft took off with
approximately 3,400 passengers. Since August 14, the U.S. has evacuated and
facilitated the evacuation of approximately 30,300 people on military and
coalition flights.”
That is a lot, but there are still a lot
of Afghan allies who need to get out of the country. Evacuate Our Allies,
which presented a plan to move the
endangered allies to Guam back in June, estimated the total number of Afghans who worked
for the U.S., the coalition, or NGOs and other related entities to be at nearly
80,000. But no one knows exactly how many
Afghans need to get out; from all accounts, the U.S. government has only a rough
estimate of how many Americans remain in Afghanistan, never mind targeted Afghan allies.
Matt Zoeller, co-founder of No One Left
Behind, offered a detailed and
impassioned assessment of the crisis this weekend. He had written in April that, “we have to understand, anyone who
worked with us, has likely excommunicated themselves from the society around
them thanks to that work. They are viewed by that society as American spies,
traitors, and in the worst case, apostates. We have an obligation to save these
people while we can — which is now.” His organization estimated before the
airlift began that more than 50,000 Afghan wartime allies and evacuees live
outside of Kabul, and that asking them to “run the Taliban gauntlet of
checkpoints is a suicide mission.”
My reader described a call from one of his
former engineers in Kabul:
The Entry
Control Point leading to the north gate of [Kabul International Airport] is
jammed with Afghans — likely thousands, he could not count. He is camped out
with his wife and 4 kids. The [U.S. government] only lets in a few at a time.
It’s a trickle. He has [Special Immigrant Visa] status — but he still has to
wait days in an entry control point to get in.
I asked
him how many planes take off each day. He said, ‘not many, sir. The planes
mostly just sit there.’ He is told the chokepoint is Qatar. They have no other
places ready to accept thousands of refugees.
Being near the airport is not necessarily
a safe spot. The Taliban are reportedly
seizing any U.S. passports they find. A gunfight just outside the airport killed at
least one Afghan soldier early Monday. The German military tweeted that one member of the Afghan security
forces was killed and three others were wounded by “unknown attackers.” The
U.S. military is concerned that the Afghan affiliate of ISIS may target the
crowds by the airport. And departing military planes are using decoy
flares, an indication that they fear someone
will fire a surface-to-air missile at them.
As tense as this situation is, it may well
get much worse by midnight local time next Wednesday. President Biden said
yesterday that the U.S. may not have all forces withdrawn by the end of the
month, depending upon the pace of the evacuation. The Taliban declared this
morning that August 31 is an intractable deadline, and that breaking that
deadline would involve “consequences.”
My reader spoke with another one of his
company’s engineers Saturday night, one who had not made it to the airport yet.
“He, his wife and five children are hiding in a bedroom of a friend’s apartment
in Kabul. Twice yesterday, the Taliban knocked on the door asking for him. He
is terrified for his daughters. He has no idea how to get to the airport past
the Taliban checkpoints. Airport Road, Tajikan Road and Russia Road are the
only ways in and the Taliban controls those routes.”
My reader’s anger, heartbreak, fear, and
disgust is palpable. “Somebody claiming to have planned for every contingency
is delusional,” he concludes.
Brad Taylor — whom you may know for his
thriller novels, but who was also a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army
Infantry and served for more than 21 years, retiring as a Special Forces
Lieutenant Colonel — pointed out
this weekend that the U.S. military trains and
prepares for “NEOs” (Noncombatant Evacuation Operations) — all the time. There
is a playbook for this type of dangerous situation that, for some
not-yet-explained reason, has not been used. Taylor concludes that, “We should
not be asking the Taliban for clear passage to the airport and then telling
[American citizens] in Kabul to make their own way. We should be executing a
forcible entry into the city and evacuating every last [American citizen]. The
message should be clear: We aren’t hostile to you, unless you’re hostile to us,
but we’re establishing corridors of evacuation, and if you attempt to stop us,
you will die. And then back up that threat with firepower.”
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