If you’ve been watching the news at all today, you’d likely come under the assumption that all is well in Afghanistan after a week of abject chaos. Don’t be fooled. Things are not well. At all. If you are an American in Afghanistan and you cannot get to the unsecured Kabul airport before August 31, you will be left behind by the Biden Administration. Do not doubt me.
Amidst multiple Pentagon briefings and the “mainstream” media’s ongoing attempt to downplay the miserable failure that is the Biden Administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan by playing up the fact that, according to the Pentagon (certainly not a reliable source given the political ramifications of this botched job) the US military has gotten “16,000 people out” of Afghanistan since last week or attempts to distract viewers by talking about COVID-19, the fact remains that Americans are still largely on the ground in Afghanistan and unable to get home.
So, for all the hoopla about these people that have been saved by the haphazard military evacuation, it’s likely that the bulk of those people–if those Pentagon numbers are at all correct–are not American citizens. And that’s the important part, isn’t it?
The US military’s primary job, before it helps the citizens of allies countries or the benighted girls of Afghanistan or our translators, etc. (all of whom we should be helping), is to evacuate actual American citizens from the shithole that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is becoming.
How many actual US nationals have been rescued from Afghanistan since the civilian pullout began in earnest last weekend?
There almost 15,000 US citizens in Afghanistan. Many of them are in Kabul. Many more are beyond Kabul. Almost all of these people, however, cannot get to Kabul to flee via the only beachhead the US military now controls in the country: Karzai International Airport in Kabul.
Taliban checkpoints stand between them and the airport, as do a variety of other threats, ranging from al Qaeda and IS-K terrorists to angry denizens of Kabul who feel abandoned and betrayed by the sudden American pullout.
For their part, the Biden Administration continue pressing forward with the improbable narrative that, “all those Americans who want to get out of Afghanistan” before the self-imposed August 31, 2021 deadline “will be able to get out.”
Earlier today, former Obama Administration Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia went on MSNBC to explain that she had several friends and former colleagues–American citizens–who, by droves, could not safely get to the airport to depart.
Beyond that, Farkas explained that things were so messy in Afghanistan with the pullout of American citizens that many Americans could not leave even if they could get to the airport because of botched “paperwork.” There are Americans in Afghanistan who have young children without proper travel papers, meaning that the parents could easily depart for the airport and return to the United States…but they’d have to leave their little ones behind in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan!
Even for those Americans who can depart with no messy paperwork problems, the State Department has issued a travel advisory to any Americans attempting to enter the Karzai International Airport: don’t go or be prepared to be harassed, attacked, kidnapped, or killed by the Taliban fighters manning the dozens of checkpoints between yourself and the airport in Kabul.
This is hardly a realistic way to pull 15,000 Americans out. Meanwhile, the British and Germans keep upstaging the Americans, with the former gleefully deploying paratrooper units deep into Kabul to retrieve their citizens and with the latter group taking any citizen from any country with them on their planes out of the country–including some Americans.
But for John Kirby, the noted liar and current Pentagon spokesperson, upwards of “7,000” people have been exfiltrated from Kabul in the last week. Whose people? And if they were ours, were they military or actual civilians? No one is giving a straight answer in public. And, frankly, the media isn’t really asking this important, very specific question.
Notice how he rarely specifies their nationality.
Fact is, after 20 years, Americans have spread out throughout the countryside of Afghanistan as part of our “winning-the-hearts-and-minds” mission. They’ve been embedded in distant villages and localities and have no reliable way to get to the Kabul airport short of a full blown military escort.
While some helicopter missions have apparently occurred, they are usually confined to Kabul. Last Friday, apparently, a US helicopter flew to a hotel near the Karzai International Airport and exfiltrated 169 American nationals who had been holed up there and brought them to the airport. The last time I checked, though, that number is nowhere near the number of actual Americans in need of rescuing in Afghanistan before the self-imposed August 31 deadline.
In fact, the US military is so hesitant (or, rather, the Biden Administration’s political hacks are) to deploy rescue and retrieval forces for Americans spread throughout the country that they won’t even venture outside the barely secured airport gates to save Americans being hassled by Taliban personnel at checkpoints within eyesight of US military forces at the airport.
I honestly don’t know who, precisely, is being evacuated from the American-held Karzai International Airport, but I’d venture to guess that most of them are not American civilians. And there is ample reportage indicating that multiple flights have departed from Kabul that are half-full because Americans cannot get to the airport.
Yet, the head of US Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) assured reporters at the Pentagon today that military flights were coming and going almost every hour. The question, though, is how full were they?
And, if they were full, how many Americans were there any how many were non-Americans?
Again, I want to save our allies as much as I want to save our 15,000 civilians in Afghanistan. But the main priority of the US military must be to get actual American citizens out first and then sort the rest later.
The Biden Administration is being purposely obtuse about the numbers. And I think I know why: no matter what, by August 31, the Pentagon will fold up its mission at the Karzai International Airport lest they offend the blessed sensibilities of their Taliban…partners…?
Since that is precisely what has transpired since at least May of this year: President Biden has effectively done their bidding when he removed the bulk of US forces without checking to see if the Taliban were holding their end of the Doha Agreement signed between former President Donald Trump and the Taliban in February 2020.
Mr. Biden continued parroting Taliban talking points after he surreptitiously withdrew American forces from our hardened facility at Bagram Airbase. Without a doubt, the abandonment of Bagram is the reason that the Afghan National Army (ANA) collapsed within a few weeks of the drawdown.
But, I digress.
No one really knows how many Americans have been evacuated from Afghanistan and how many need to be retrieved. One can assume that the number in need of rescuing before the August 31 deadline is in the many thousands.
If you are an American in Afghanistan you need to make other arrangements. The Biden Administration has already consigned you to being your local Taliban governor’s war booty. The institutions have failed you, clearly.
We will leave you behind because it is politically convenient for the Sleepwalker-in-Chief, Joe Biden, to do so–and he is surrounded by a cast of cowards who are too afraid to say anything to the clearly demented forty-sixth president, lest they lose their tenuous grip on political power.
Americans will be left behind. After August 31 any semblance of US military power in Afghanistan vanishes. No rescues will really be mounted. These people have been forsaken by a government that doesn’t care about them because their existence and safety is politically inconvenient.
The American people will be lied to by the Biden Administration; if it ever comes out that Americans were left behind, the reality of their existence will be downplayed and obfuscated long enough until the next news cycle can consume people’s attention. This is what it means to be an American in Joe Biden’s America. Not much.
THE WEICHERT REPORT 
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