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WHO ARE WE BRINGING OUT OF AFGHANISTAN? During his brief remarks on Afghanistan Tuesday — no questions allowed — President Biden touted the number of people the United States has evacuated from Afghanistan. “As of this afternoon, we’ve helped evacuate 70,700 people, just since August the 14th,” the president said, “75,900 people since the end of July.” In the previous 12 hours, Biden added, “coalition flights carrying 5,600 people have left Kabul.”
Biden was referring to more than just the American effort. But the White House, having brought on the crisis with Biden’s historic bungling of the U.S. withdrawal, is showing growing pride in the sheer numbers of people removed. “This is now on track to be the largest airlift in U.S. history,” spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Tuesday, “I would not say that is anything but a success.”
Put aside the White House’s pathetic claims of success. Who is the U.S. flying out of Afghanistan? Earlier Tuesday, Politico reporter Alex Ward tweeted leaked evacuation numbers from the State Department as of Monday afternoon. They showed that the total number of people removed from Kabul since midnight the night before was 483 American citizens, 6,425 Afghan nationals, and eight people from third countries or whose origin was unknown.
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Ward reported that the total numbers since the operation began were that U.S. forces had evacuated 4,407 American citizens, 21,533 Afghan nationals, and 642 others. Later, a State Department spokesman confirmed to Ward, “We have evacuated approximately more than 4,000 American passport holders plus their families. We expect that number to continue to grow in the coming days.”
The numbers raise a big question: Why is the U.S. evacuating so many more Afghans than Americans? Hasn’t the president said that rescuing American citizens is the administration’s top priority? As it stands, it appears that U.S. planes evacuate about five Afghans for every one American.
First of all, the Biden administration will not reveal how many U.S. citizens are in Afghanistan. We’ve heard the range of 10,000 to 15,000 thrown around, but no one is saying with any more specificity. But if that range is correct, there are a lot of U.S. citizens who have not yet been flown out of Afghanistan. Why not?
Perhaps there are some Americans who don’t want to leave. But with the Taliban taking over the country and violence increasing, it seems unlikely that number is very large.
Are the Americans stranded, unable to travel to the Kabul airport and unreachable by U.S. forces? That seems more likely. It also makes it even more worrisome that the White House denies, as Psaki did Monday, that any Americans are stranded. “It’s irresponsible to say Americans are ‘stranded,'” Psaki said. “They are not.”
Now, Psaki is promising that all Americans who want to leave Afghanistan will leave Afghanistan. “We are committed to bringing Americans, who want to come home, home,” she said.
But how is that actually working? The White House is touting the raw numbers of people flown out of Afghanistan while at the same time being squirrelly on how many U.S. citizens are in the country and want to leave. And the numbers that Alex Ward cited, taken from the manifests of planes leaving Afghanistan, show far more Afghan nationals than U.S. citizens leaving on American planes. The Biden White House owes the public an explanation for that.
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