Right now, there are zero daily flights to save Afghans who helped Americans. As far as I can tell, the administration does not intend to evacuate Afghans anytime soon, if ever. This week, I spoke with a senior official who asked to remain anonymous in order to describe the administration’s current thinking. “We’ve been seized with this issue,” he said, “since before the president made his decision about the future troop presence.” Cabinet officers or their deputies have held regular meetings at the White House to discuss it. In the past 60 days, the administration has doubled the number of officials working on Special Immigrant Visas in Kabul and substantially increased personnel responsible for other phases of the process. “We are comfortable saying we have reduced processing time by 50 percent or more,” the senior official said. “We were looking at previous processing of 18 months or two years or more. We have got it down to roughly on the order of nine to 12 months.” By his calculation, at the present rate, 1,000 to 1,400 applicants would have their cases decided every month through the rest of the year. To clear all 18,000 cases would take at least until next summer... Evacuation would be practically hard and politically risky. No doubt an administration that polls poorly on immigration fears a public backlash, particularly as America approaches the bitter 20th anniversary of September 11. Evacuation would require the suspension of all kinds of standard procedures. There is always the risk of fraud, and perhaps of allowing an enemy combatant into the United States. The spectacle of evacuation might induce Afghan security forces to panic and desert in even larger numbers than they’re deserting now, causing a rush to the airports and borders and a collapse of the government of President Ashraf Ghani. The same kind of concerns delayed the Ford administration’s evacuation of our Vietnamese allies as South Vietnam collapsed in the spring of 1975, until the president finally changed course, when it was too late for most of them. “I am intimately familiar with the historical precedent of this,” the senior administration official said. “We are intensively looking at a range of possibilities but don’t have any decisions, including recommendations that people have been making from the outside, about moving people out of country.” I suggested that the only way to prevent an immense tragedy and a historic American shame is to throw out the current approach, think past familiar limits, and take a more drastic route. The official declined to say more about the possibility of evacuation.