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AFGHAN EVACUATION MISSION CREEP? After Thursday’s terrible suicide bombing attack that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers and wounded 18 others working on the evacuation of Afghanistan, President Joe Biden vowed to continue the mission without interruption. “We will not be deterred by terrorists,” the president said late Thursday afternoon. “We will not let them stop our mission. We will continue the evacuation.”
But Biden’s speech, combined with statements that he and other administration officials have made earlier, raised questions about how much more of the mission remains undone. How many people will be evacuated?
On Thursday, Biden said the airlift had already evacuated “more than 100,000 American citizens, American partners, Afghans who helped us, and others.” Putting the words “American citizens” immediately after the number “100,000” seemed to suggest that many of those evacuated have been U.S. citizens. But in fact, the number of American citizens is only about 5,000 — roughly one-twentieth of the airlift so far.
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For more than a week, the Biden administration refused to say how many Americans were in Afghanistan. There were estimates that it was somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000. But on Wednesday, the day before the bombing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the number was actually significantly smaller.
“Starting on August 14, when our evacuation began, there was then a population of as many as 6,000 American citizens in Afghanistan who wanted to leave,” Blinken said. (He later added that some unknown number of Americans are in the country and choose not to leave.) Of the 6,000, Blinken continued, 4,500 have been evacuated, with another 500 soon to follow. As for the final 1,000, Blinken said the State Department is “aggressively reaching out” to them “to determine whether they still want to leave and to get the most up-to-date information and instructions to them for how to do so.” Some might have already left the country, Blinken added.
In any event, it appears that out of the 100,000 people mentioned by President Biden, about 5,000 are U.S. citizens. That is fewer Americans, and more Afghans, than Biden said eight days ago, in the only interview he has granted during the crisis, with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. At that point, Biden did not disagree with the estimate of 10,000 to 15,000 Americans in Afghanistan, and he said the total number of others to be evacuated was somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000. Here is the relevant part of that interview:
STEPHANOPOULOS: We’ve got, like, 10,000 to 15,000 Americans in the country right now, right? And are you committed to making sure that the troops stay until every American who wants to be out, is out?
BIDEN: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How about our Afghan allies? We have about 80,000 people —
BIDEN: Well, that’s not the —
STEPHANOPOULOS: Is that too high?
BIDEN: That’s too high.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How many —
BIDEN: The estimate we’re giving is somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000 folks total, counting their families.
That is significantly fewer than the president said on Thursday. Perhaps Biden was misinformed. Or perhaps the mission has grown to include more Afghans than originally envisioned. Estimates of those who “need” to be rescued go all over the place — into the hundreds of thousands.
Over the last 20 years, U.S. involvement in Afghanistan has come to be the latest example of what is known as “mission creep” — the expansion of a military involvement into areas far beyond its original purpose. Biden’s evacuation was supposed to put an end to that process in Afghanistan. Now, it appears the evacuation might be undergoing mission creep of its own.
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