The Taliban allowed approximately 200 foreign citizens to leave Afghanistan on a plane departing Kabul airport Thursday, but the gesture won’t allay the suspicions of U.S. lawmakers wary of the terrorist regime.
“It’s obviously good news, on the face of it, but I think the Taliban — if anything has changed, it’s their propaganda machine has improved markedly,” Rep. Mike Waltz, a Florida Republican and Army veteran who fought in Afghanistan, told the Washington Examiner.
The flight out of Kabul marks a breakthrough in international efforts to reopen the airport following the exit of the U.S. military from Afghanistan, which ended with a tumultuous evacuation operation at Hamid Karzai International Airport. The plane took off just days after Taliban officials unveiled a regime Cabinet that features the leader of a major terrorist organization as interior minister. It is being hailed as a crucial sign of progress and hope for Americans and at-risk Afghans otherwise stranded in the country.
“Call it what you want, a charter or a commercial flight, everyone has tickets and boarding passes,” Qatari special envoy Mutlaq bin Majed al Qahtani, whose government helped orchestrate the Qatar Airways flight, told reporters Thursday. “Hopefully, life is becoming normal in Afghanistan.”
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The renewal of flights through Kabul airport could simplify what has been a confounding and dangerous process for attempting to leave Afghanistan in the days since the U.S. military departure. U.S. officials have been coordinating with Qatar and Turkey to reopen the capital city’s airport, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken has blamed the Taliban for failing to allow the departure of charter flights stuck at an airport in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
“As of now, the Taliban are not permitting the charter flights to depart,” Blinken told reporters Wednesday. “We’ve made clear to all parties, we made clear to the Taliban, that these charters need to be able to depart, and we continue every day, virtually every hour, to work on that.”
Would-be evacuees and U.S. officials have cited several factors that impede the departure of those flights and other efforts to leave the country. The Taliban are refusing to permit the departure of anyone who does not hold a U.S. passport or similar document, according to Blinken, while vulnerable Americans and at-risk Afghans face a host of logistical problems now that the U.S. military has withdrawn and Taliban forces control the country.
Some at-risk Afghans, for instance, lost their passports when the U.S. Embassy closed and documents were destroyed by diplomatic officials who sought to protect the identities of the Afghans left behind.
“These families, if they have any hope of getting out, need passports,” Jewish Family Service of Seattle’s Cordelia Revells, who leads the nonprofit organization’s refugee team, said last week. “Even if they’re trying to, you know, go through land borders to neighboring countries, they need a passport to do that. … I sincerely hope the U.S. develops options for them.”
Yet, those kinds of difficulties necessitate caution among U.S. officials, according to President Joe Biden’s team.
“There are some challenges, as it relates to documentation, where a number of people may not have documentation, some for good reason — because they’re trying to depart Afghanistan,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday. “We are not going to allow flights to land where we don’t know what security protocols have been taken, whether people have been vetted, who is on these — who are on these planes. And I don’t think the vast majority of American citizens want us to do that either.”
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That logistical morass presents Taliban leaders with an array of opportunities to manipulate or pressure U.S. officials, according to Waltz.
“I fully expected them to allow some Americans to go in kind of a very demonstrable way. But meanwhile, they have plenty that they can quietly hold back for leverage,” he said. “At the end of the day, we have a globally designated terrorist deciding who can stay and who can go.”
