Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team believes that “the majority” of Afghan nationals who worked with the U.S. government were left behind due to the difficulty of identifying Americans and eligible Afghans in the midst of a hectic and dangerous evacuation effort from the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.
“It involved some really painful trade-offs and choices for everyone involved,” a senior State Department official told reporters Wednesday. “Everybody who lived it is haunted by the choices we had to make and by the people we were not able to help depart in this first phase of the operation.”
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Blinken’s team has emphasized that “many thousands” of Afghans who worked with American and allied forces were evacuated. But U.S. officials are uncertain about how many of those people, who would be eligible for special issuance visas, remain in the country despite a massive evacuation effort that was complicated by the presence of the Taliban in the city, the threat of terrorist attacks, and even the danger of “mob violence” at the perimeter of the airport.
“Those crowds that were outside the access points were on the verge of flipping to a mob at any given moment of any given day,” the senior State Department official said. “And the more that we and other nations went out and tried to pull individuals out of that undifferentiated crowd and bring them in, the closer to mob violence we came, every time.”
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The Taliban’s offensive this year drove approximately 400,000 people from their homes, according to a United Nations refugee agency estimate published the day before the evacuation effort began. U.N. officials noted at the time that “nearly 120,000 Afghans have fled” specifically to Kabul province, but the State Department estimates that as many as 1 million people fled to the city from around the country, even as U.S. forces poured into Kabul to secure the airport and begin an evacuation.
That convergence on the capital city created a difficult dynamic for the U.S. personnel on the perimeter, one that the official likened to two large bodies of water linked by a canal the size of a drinking straw.
“We had an enormous pool of people we were trying to help, and on the other end, we had substantial capacity … to take those people off the ground from the airport in Kabul,” the official said. “But in between those two big pools, we had very limited access points to move that targeted population, but still an enormous population of people, safely and sustainably onto the airfield so we could get them on planes going out.”
In fact, State Department officials don’t know how many ineligible Afghan citizens managed to slip into the airport and obtain a seat on one of the evacuation planes. “I don’t have good data for you on that,” a senior official acknowledged.
U.S. officials tried to streamline the effort by sending “an electronic credential” to people eligible for entry to the airport, but that system failed because the recipients started distributing the passes to other people who were not eligible. A similar phenomenon jeopardized plans for how to get American citizens into the airport safely. U.S. officials tried to mitigate the risk by instructing at least some Americans to head for “pop-up bus locations throughout Kabul,” according to a Senate Republican aide familiar with the effort — but those weren’t the kinds of secrets that could be kept.
“That word would spread quickly, and that location would be overwhelmed with Afghans trying to get out,” the Senate Republican aide said. “That was a solution for Americans waiting to leave, but even those would break down.”
The inability to establish a reliable means of identifying Afghans eligible for evacuation, combined with the pressure to evacuate Americans, the senior State Department official said, prevented U.S. personnel from evacuating many people who otherwise would have been authorized to leave through the airport — leading to disputes between U.S. officials and the humanitarian organizations or other entities seeking to arrange the evacuation of at-risk Afghans.
“We, unfortunately, had to start prioritizing the people to whom we had a legal obligation, first and foremost, and that was our fellow American citizens,” the senior State Department official said. “One of the most searing experiences for many of my colleagues, all of whom received direct outreach from a wide range of advocates on behalf of individual Afghans … was the level of criticism to which they were subjected by these individual advocacy groups, who were essentially trying to get us to prioritize Afghan nationals over American citizens.”
However, the majority of State Department officials involved in that effort have volunteered for the assignment of helping the Afghans who are eligible to leave the country.
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“We feel an enormous commitment to keep faith with all of the people to whom we owe this debt,” the senior State Department official said. “We’re going to continue to do all we can in the coming weeks and months to fulfill that commitment and to help those who wish to leave Afghanistan to do so.”
