The USAGM journalists and staffers had every connection a group of potential evacuees could wish for, and their expectations were correspondingly high. After all, the U.S. government had moved heaven and earth to get Afghan journalists from private U.S. news organizations to safety. Surely, they assumed, it wouldn’t abandon the reporters for whom it was directly responsible. But they were wrong.

The RFE/RL journalists and their families made several independent trips to the airport, often spending long days and nights waiting just outside the gates, but never managed to get inside, RFE/RL President Jamie Fly told me during an interview. And now, they are stranded.

“You would have expected that the United States government, which helped create the space for journalism and civil society in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, would have tried to do more over the last several weeks to assist journalists who made a decision that it was best for them to leave the country,” Fly said. “But they consistently failed to do that.”