My colleague, Mike Miller, posted just a short while ago about an American diplomatic gambit that will live in infamy. From Pleading With Terrorists? CIA Director Meets With Taliban as Evacuation Fears Grow:
As reported by Fox News on Tuesday morning, CIA Director William Burns secretly met with Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Kabul on Monday, desperately seeking an extension of the Taliban’s August 31 deadline for all U.S. military personal to leave the country, a senior U.S. official confirmed to Fox.
And there it is. Remaining U.S. citizens be damned.
Think about that for a minute. The United States of America, surrendering, period. To anyone. But to a brutal Islamist terrorist organization that is terrorizing its own citizen — “our Afghan allies” as Biden delusionally called them, Sunday? Good Gawd, man — what the hell?
The big focus of this visit has been on the Taliban stating that the August 31 withdrawal date for US and allied forces from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) is a “redline.”
According to The Guardian, extending the 31 August deadline is a redline.https://t.co/9OjWVWLlGy
— wendy M Cali (@wendyMCali) August 23, 2021
But there is another angle that is being underreported. The Taliban also said that no further Afghans would be allowed to go to the airport. Via Deutsche Welle:
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid gave a press briefing and asked the US not to encourage Afghan people to leave the country.
He said the group is no longer allowing Afghan nationals to go to Kabul airport and called on crowds at the airport to go home.
Mujahid said “our aim is to rebuild our country.”
“We are asking women to stay home at the moment,” until security is guaranteed, the Taliban spokesperson said. He added that Taliban fighters are not yet trained on “how to deal with women.”
In regards to the Panjshir Valley region which is controlled by resistance forces, he said the Taliban would like to resolve the situation through dialogue.
Mujahid claimed media outlets are safe and free to work under Taliban rule.
This is from the Substack long-time milblog acquaintance, CDR Salamander, on Twitter at @cdrsalamander.
All that we do in Kabul now is under the good graces of the Taliban. Without them, nothing we do in would be possible. As such, if you are willing to swallow the pill of abandoning non-Americans who put their lives on the line for us, there is some good thing here.
First, this removes some, but not all, of the problems US citizens and those of allied nations have had getting to the airport. If the masses of Afghans are told they will not be allowed to get in the airport, then that should back the World War Z human masses from the gates.
Secondly, if masses of Afghans are not there on the final day, then if the Taliban are nice enough, we will be able to leave in state of relative composure without leaving the bodies of Afghan civilians strewn about the airfield in our wake.
Will there be US citizens and Green Card holders left behind in Afghanistan as of September 1st? Almost certainly. That will be the next phase.
Remember, this was all by choice. It did not have to end this way.
I’ll have to admit that I’m a lot less enthusiastic about vacuuming up everyone at HKIA than are a lot of people. I’m much more with Ohio Senate hopeful J. D. Vance than some/many of my friends:
Wherein, J.D. Vance puts Ben Sasse in his place. 👇
— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) August 24, 2021
One man on a UK “no-fly” terrorist watch list was flown to Birmingham, UK.
Afghan ‘on no-fly list jets into UK on plane during Kabul evacuation’ https://t.co/XQzJatq6wJ
— Evening Standard (@EveningStandard) August 23, 2021
We know the Taliban are taking travel documents from legitimate Afghan refugees, and from that, we can assume that a non-trivial number of intelligence operatives are being inserted into the refugee stream. This poses a grave threat to hosting countries as these people intimidate Afghan refugees into silence or complicity by putting pressure on relatives in Afghanistan. That said, watching the snuff flicks of the Taliban using a chainsaw on former interpreters for US forces is not something we should allow to happen.
That said, Biden and the Democrats have lied to us for a week about how this fiasco would end.
While there’s still work to be done, the United States has made progress in evacuating American citizens and our Afghan allies, and the Biden administration remains committed to bringing our people and our allies to safety as quickly as possible. pic.twitter.com/82gDmExtpQ
— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) August 20, 2021
Given the state of the evacuation effort, we will be hard-pressed to repatriate the Americans in Afghanistan by the deadline. We can’t possibly evacuate every Afghan who is arguably deserving of that chance. Under the best of circumstances, this would be a disaster. But this is not the best of circumstances. We now have a hard deadline staring us in the face. While I hear a lot of people talking about the US just ignoring the deadline, I don’t know how that works. Even with massive air support, the troops at HKIA would be outnumbered and reliant upon airdrops for water, food, and ammunition. Medical evacuation would be nearly impossible. The feasibility of getting cargo planes full of civilians off the ground from that airport is nil. Then, once the civilian piece of the evacuation is complete, how do you get the troops out?
In a twisted sort of way, the Taliban just handed Joe Biden a lifeline. If they keep Afghans from coming to the airport, then we can focus on getting Americans out. Given what we’ve seen, though, one can’t help but be struck by the nagging feeling that we will evacuate neither our citizens nor our Afghan allies or maybe even our troops.
Not even Vietnam ended this badly.
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