WASHINGTON – More than 70,700 people were evacuated from Afghanistan on Tuesday evening. Nearly 6,000 US troops are protecting the international airport in the capital Kabul. And additional US flights depart every 45 minutes.
The Biden administration has provided a torrent of updates on its airlift of Americans, Afghans and others since August 14, as the Taliban approached Kabul. Still, U.S. officials are hesitant to estimate the single number that matters most: how many people ultimately need to be rescued.
That count has never been more critical as the US government prepares to phase out evacuations as the US military begins its final withdrawal from Afghanistan. On Tuesday, President Biden confirmed his plan to remove all US troops by August 31, although he left room “to adjust the timeline should the need arise.”
But US officials believe thousands of Americans remain in Afghanistan, including some far outside Kabul, without a safe or fast way to get to the airport. Tens of thousands of Afghans who have worked for the US government for the past 20 years and are eligible for special visas are desperate to leave.
And refugee and resettlement experts estimate that at least 300,000 Afghans are at risk of attack by the Taliban for collaborating with the Americans and US efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.
Speaking about his talks with other world leaders, Mr. Biden said at the White House on Tuesday evening that they had agreed to “continue our close collaboration to get people out as efficiently and safely as possible.”
“We are currently on a pace to be ready by August 31,” said Mr. Biden. “The sooner we’re done, the better.”
But other senior US officials doubt the evacuations will be complete by then.
“Americans want us to stay until we get our people out, and so do our allies,” Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse said Tuesday. Biden, he added, should “tell the Taliban to get our people out no matter how long it takes.”
Government officials say the numbers are changing hourly, if not minute by minute, especially as other countries have their own evacuation operations.
But the American effort is undoubtedly the largest. Given the resources and risk the United States is putting into the evacuation, how can the government not know how many people it plans to fly out?
“Very good question! We wonder the same thing,” said James Miervaldis, president of No One Left Behind, a non-profit organization that advocates the relocation of Afghan interpreters to the United States.
This is what we know.
Does the US government not keep track of how many Americans are in Afghanistan?
Kind of.
The US embassy in Kabul is contacting Americans believed to be in Afghanistan – officials say there may be thousands – and offering them safe passage to the airport in Kabul to fly out. But the warnings only go to Americans who provided the government with their location before Kabul fell or in the week after.
The situation has led US officials to search databases that may be severely outdated or underestimate the number of US citizens in the country. A Biden government official said most Americans in Afghanistan are dual citizens and may never have registered with the embassy or otherwise informed the US government of their whereabouts.
“It’s our responsibility to find them, which we’re doing hour after hour,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said Monday. “In the remaining days, we believe we have the means to get the American citizens out of Kabul who want to leave.”
More than 4,000 U.S. citizens and their families have been evacuated so far, a senior State Department official said Tuesday. There are thousands more: A day earlier, a congressional official estimated the total number of American citizens left in Afghanistan at 10,000. It was not clear how many of the 4,000 evacuated were included in that count.
Why was it so difficult to estimate who qualifies for a special immigrant visa? Does the United States have no payroll or employee lists that keep track of this?
First some history about the so-called SIV program.
In 2009, Congress approved a special refuge for Afghans who had worked for the US military and US embassy as interpreters, translators, consultants and other jobs during the war, and who could have been targeted by the Taliban or other extremists for helping of the United States.
The International Rescue Committee estimates that there are tens of thousands of Afghans eligible for the special visas. But since 2014, only about 16,000 Afghans have received the special visas, and the State Department faced a backlog of more than 17,000 applications when Biden took office in January.
Between mid-July and August 14, the State Department evacuated about 2,000 Afghans who were eligible for the visas. After a break of several days last week as the Biden administration focused on evacuating US citizens and embassy personnel, flights for former Afghan workers have resumed; the first planeload of special immigration visa holders since the fall of Kabul took off from Ramstein Air Base in Germany early Monday and headed for the United States.
A Congressional official said the Biden administration had identified about 50,000 special visa applicants and their families who needed to be evacuated. But the assistant said there were many more eligible.
Sunil Varghese, the policy director for the International Refugee Assistance Project, said it was not clear how many Afghans qualified for the program — mainly because the Pentagon and the State Department had poorly coordinated and communicated with each other about who had worked for whom. . any agency.
And without a centralized U.S. government database to track former employees in Afghanistan, Afghans had to prove they had worked for the United States, Varghese said.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Who are the Taliban? The Taliban emerged in 1994 amid the unrest following the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. They used brutal public punishment, including flogging, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more about their origin story and their track record as rulers.
So if Americans and SIV holders have been evacuated, is that it?
Far from. The government recognizes that there are hundreds of thousands of Afghans believed to be at high risk of being targeted by the Taliban, including former Afghan security forces, government officials, journalists, judges and prosecutors, and women’s rights advocates.
The State Department said it had accelerated its referrals of high-risk Afghans to the US Refugee Admissions Program. However, that program would generally require Afghans to apply through the United Nations Refugee Agency and wait for approval — a process that could take years.
On Friday, the State Department planned to admit up to 50,000 Afghans into the United States under a humanitarian parole — meaning they would be temporarily housed on military bases until their visas were processed, according to a memo from a resettlement worker.
“This caseload would be separate from — and on top of — the Afghan refugee or SIV cases that will also continue to be admitted,” the memo said, confirmed by a person familiar with it, saying even 50,000 is a huge undercount. was of those in need. The State Department declined to comment.
A government official said the number of people to be evacuated could exceed 100,000. The International Rescue Committee has a much higher estimate: 300,000 Afghan civilians alone.
Is it even possible to get so many people out in time?
Unlikely. It is widely expected that the evacuation mission will slow to a trickle once the US military leaves. Without the protection of the 6,000 US troops in Kabul, the military airlift will end and State Department charter flights will slow down and even stop altogether. In addition, some other foreign governments have said they would have little choice but to leave.
The Biden administration is warning the Taliban, who want international aid to continue to Afghanistan, to allow Afghans to leave the country — a pledge that State Department chief spokesman Ned Price said would was “expiry date”.
“So it certainly speaks for itself – and we will hold the Taliban to this; the rest of the world will too — that individuals who want to leave after the US military is gone have the chance to do so,” Mr Price said Monday.
But on Tuesday, the Taliban said they would block Afghans trying to leave the country from traveling to the Kabul airport.
“I beg the United States to help my family — the family that learned English, served in military posts, and are now in immediate danger for helping America,” said Fatima Jaghoori, a naturalized American citizen born in Afghanistan. . and served in Iraq with the US military. Her husband, who also served in the US military, was killed in Afghanistan.
“Let my service and sacrifice be a sign to bring my family to safety,” she wrote in a letter to US officials. “My family has no chance of life if they are left to the Taliban rule.”
David Zucchini and Alexandra E. Petri reporting contributed.
