The end is approaching quickly in Afghanistan, just as many of us have been predicting for quite some time now. After the Taliban’s “symbolic” taking of two provincial capitals this week in advance of the final removal of the last American and NATO troops outside of the green zone, everyone is on edge. There isn’t much left of the country that they don’t control, and as of this weekend, the embassy is advising all Americans to get out of the country. And they mean get out now, not by Christmas or 9/11. They didn’t include the phrase “flee as you value your lives” in the announcement, but they may as well have. (Daily Beast)
The U.S. embassy in Afghanistan urged U.S. citizens in the country to flee immediately, coming just as the Taliban captured multiple cities in the last 24 hours. “Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited even within Kabul,” the nation’s capital, the U.S. said Saturday. It said it would provide citizens who could not afford to leave at once with a repatriation loan, which includes money to help return home. The U.S. already recalled non-essential employees of its Kabul office back home in April.
The State Department listed Afghanistan as a Level 4-Do Not Travel country, its highest designation for unsafe countries.
You can read the official announcement from the embassy here. As you will see, this isn’t a warning for certain hotspots where the Taliban might be more active. The listed location is “All of Afghanistan.”
They are warning Americans and allies to use “available commercial transportation and not plan to rely on U.S. government flights.” The grim implications in that warning should be crystal clear. They’re getting ready to turn over control of the commercial airport outside of Kabul. Once that is finished, there may not be any more commercial flights and there very well might not be any government flights either.
Nobody is saying how many Americans are left inside the green zone, but it’s been known for weeks that getting from there to the airport is already almost impossible without a helicopter. The roads through the city haven’t been safe for a while now. And once the airport is no longer an option, escape may simply not be possible.
The Biden administration spent most of this year pretending that the government we helped to establish in Kabul was going to remain in control and that we would have an embassy there to work with them and continue negotiations with the Taliban and keep an eye on the situation. We could have been using this time to slowly get everyone, including our translators and helpers out of the country. Emptying the military airfield at Bagram before turning over the commercial airport is looking to have been a worse and worse idea. That would have been the most secure location from which to execute the final bug out. And yet we still have journalists on the left predicting that there’s no way this will turn into a disastrous retreat.
The Taliban has been telegraphing its punches for months. Nearly a month ago they had already started slaughtering increasing numbers of women and children as they retook territory that we’ve held for twenty years. They recently pulled one of our translators out of his vehicle right outside of Kabul and beheaded him by the side of the road.
It appears to be too late to slam the brakes on this operation while we get everyone out because we likely don’t have enough remaining forces to safeguard all the turf we may need to cover. Shipping a large number of troops back into the country would be a huge embarrassment for the White House and might prove logistically impossible anyway. In the end, the decision to move forward with our exit from Afghanistan (the correct decision, by the way) was Joe Biden’s. The responsibility for executing it successfully rests on his shoulders. If he still manages to pull this off I shall congratulate him and gladly wave goodbye to that godforsaken country. But if we wind up with a ton of hostages stuck there and a pile of bodies, the Biden administration must be held accountable for lacking the foresight to plan a successful exit. This didn’t have to turn into the Fall of Saigon Part Two. And hopefully, it still won’t.
