Fall of Kabul: Afghan allies of US fear the worst

Bloomberg

President Joe Biden’s rapid pullout from Afghanistan has left thousands of Afghans who worked as translators and guides for the US military in a desperate race to escape the country to avoid being targeted by the Taliban.
Amid the chaotic US withdrawal, Afghan allies are having to navigate complicated logistics and an overburdened bureaucracy to get visa paperwork in front of US officials. Those same documents are both a ticket out of their war-torn homeland but also potentially incriminating if the Taliban discovers them.
“The Taliban are knocking on our door,” said an Afghan national who worked as an interpreter alongside US forces during some of the bloodiest years of the Afghanistan war. His name is being withheld to protect his safety. “My three daughters are always crying. We are very scared.”
With some 3,500 US troops currently on the ground securing the airport in Kabul, and more expected to arrive in the coming days, the Pentagon said it expects to be capable of evacuating 5,000 to 9,000 people a day. But they have to be able to make their way past Taliban checkpoints to get there.
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said it was the military’s “sacred obligation” to assist Afghans who worked for US forces in evacuating the country. But the military’s focus, Kirby said, is on securing the Kabul airport — not on transporting Afghans to the airport.
“You’ve got to understand the limited, tailored mission we’re trying to conduct right now,” Kirby told reporters.
The interpreter is in the same predicament as many Afghans who are caught in that limbo. He said he believed the Americans would never abandon him on the battlefield.
“We had a good relationship,” the interpreter said of his American friends, many of whom are still in regular contact with him. “We were like brothers.”
Bloomberg News has reviewed the interpreter’s employment paperwork, Afghan passport, ID and US visa application and spoken with his former military supervisor to verify his identity. Bloomberg has spoken with the interpreter on multiple occasions since Sunday.
Recent military veterans in Congress say they have watched the fall of Kabul with sadness and anger. Many have said the US is leaving friends and allies behind to the threat of retribution by the Taliban if they are discovered with paperwork identifying them as having helped the US.
“It’s a death sentence for them if they’re caught moving with that documentation,” said Representative Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican and former Green Beret who served in Afghanistan.
Waltz and his colleagues, including Representatives Jason Crow and Seth Moulton, two Democrats who also served in the military, have been pressing the administration to do more. Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who served as a Marine in Iraq, said it’s “within America’s power to save these lives.” But, he added, it requires securing the airport and eliminating onerous paperwork requirements.

“We need to save lives and then worry about immigration status,” Moulton said in an interview.
Jeffery Trammell, a U.S. Army infantry platoon leader who worked with the interpreter, said the most pressing issue is getting Afghan allies safely to the airport, a journey that is becoming more perilous by the day.
“The major issue is getting everyone out and everyone is talking about everything else,” Trammell said.
Many who qualify for special immigration visas are growing increasingly desperate as they remain in hiding, hopelessly mired in the 14-step process of getting their visas approved.
“The 1980 Refugee Act was passed precisely to stop the last-minute scrambling,” said Mark Hetfield, chief executive of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which has been resettling Afghan refugees. “But it’s been so laden with bureaucracy and red tape that it just doesn’t move.”
Members of Congress have pressed the administration to expedite visa processing, increase the cap on the number of applicants and waive some requirements. Congress also passed an emergency security supplemental that included more than $1 billion to help get people out of Afghanistan. Biden also has approved spending as much as $500 million from the Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund to assist those fleeing Afghanistan.
The Biden administration’s first flight of Afghan refugees arrived in the U.S. at the end of July when a plane carrying more than 200 people landed at Dulles International Airport. The refugees were brought to Fort Lee in Virginia, where there were to undergo health screenings and further processing of their visas. To date, Operation Allies Refuge has brought to the United States nearly 2,000 Afghan SIV applicants, according to the State Department.
Lawmakers have said that is nowhere near enough and have urged the administration to drop many of the most onerous requirements and focus on simply getting people out of the country. Images from the Kabul airport of desperate Afghans clinging to the side of an American transport plane has added additional urgency to the push.
“We can debate for a long time whether or not it was the right decision to pull out of Afghanistan,” Moulton said. “But today on the ground we can still save lives. And it’s up to the administration to do so.”

Taliban erect barriers at airport to prevent citizens from fleeing
Bloomberg

Taliban fighters have set up checkpoints around Afghanistan’s international airport, raising concerns the group may prevent citizens from fleeing the country after the US-backed government collapsed.
The checkpoints at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, the last place under US control, are only to ensure security and prevent people from rushing in after several people died in chaotic scenes this week, a senior Taliban official said. Earlier, German defense officials had said the Taliban had sealed off the airport and were only letting through foreigners.
If anyone was supposed to know how to fix Afghanistan, it was Ashraf Ghani.
Before becoming president in 2014, Ghani spent much of his life studying how to boost growth in poor nations. A Fulbright Scholar with a doctorate from Columbia University, he taught at some of America’s elite academic institutions before stints at the World Bank and United Nations. Later he co-wrote “Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.”
Now Ghani’s whereabouts are a mystery after he fled Afghanistan. Reports have spotted him everywhere from Tajikistan to Oman, with the Russians claiming he left with four cars and a helicopter full of cash. In Afghanistan he’s become a villain: his central bank chief and key members of his administration have denounced him publicly. Efforts to reach him or his close aides were unsuccessful.
In many ways, Ghani’s swift downfall reflects the broader failures of the US to impose a government on Afghanistan that had buy-in from a range of competing power brokers with a long history of fighting on the battlefield rather than at the ballot box. Although he was a Pashtun, the country’s dominant ethnic group, Ghani was seen as an outsider who lacked the political touch to unite disparate factions.

Johnson calls on allies to help stop Afghan humanitarian crisis
Bloomberg

Boris Johnson said the UK will honour its “enduring commitment” to the people of Afghanistan by accepting 20,000 refugees, and called for international cooperation to prevent a humanitarian disaster.
Speaking at an emergency session of parliament on Wednesday, Johnson said
his government’s “immediate focus” is the evacuation of British nationals and local support staff, noting that the situation has “stabilised” since the weekend and that the Taliban are allowing those efforts to proceed.
Yet he also warned of an unfolding crisis under the Taliban, and called for a new United Nations-led mission to the region. The British prime minister welcomed the support of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and announced a doubling of UK aid committed to Afghanistan this year to 286 million pounds ($394 million).
“The bulk of the effort of this country will be directed and should be directed to supporting people in Afghanistan and in the region, in order to prevent a worse humanitarian crisis,” Johnson told members of Parliament. “We have an enduring commitment to all the Afghan people, and now, more than ever, we must reaffirm that commitment.”
The rapid takeover by the Taliban has fuelled fears of a sudden exodus of Afghans seeking asylum — a politically thorny issue in the UK, as well as across the EU and nations bordering Afghanistan. Both Germany and France hold general elections next month and next year respectively, potentially making any discussion of quotas especially charged.
In the UK, the prime minister is also trying to stave off criticism, including from within his own Conservative Party, that his government failed to plan the evacuation properly and that it failed to predict the sudden collapse of the Afghan government as US troops pulled out of the country.

Refugee Crisis
The UK announced a “bespoke” resettlement program will take in 5,000 Afghans this year and 20,000 in the longer-term. The program will focus on “the most vulnerable, particularly women and children,” the prime minister told the House of Commons.
It comes on top of the 5,000 current or former locally-employed Afghan staff and their family members who the UK expects to relocate by the end of this year under a separate program.
Yet there are already signs the Afghanistan crisis could trigger renewed international tensions over refugees.
Home Secretary Priti Patel wrote in the Telegraph newspaper the UK is “doing all it can to encourage other countries to help,” adding pointedly: “We cannot do this alone.”

Patel led talks with the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — comprising the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. — on providing a safe way for people to leave Afghanistan.
The EU has long struggled to come up with a unified stance on accepting refugees, especially after the 2015 crisis in Syria, and there remain huge differences among member states on the issue.
Both Macron and Merkel stressed they want to contain any Afghanistan refugee crisis in the immediate region as far as possible.
The priority should be on providing safe options for refugees in countries bordering Afghanistan, before considering who should be eligible for coming to Europe, Merkel said.
“It’s a weak point for the European Union that we haven’t established a unified asylum policy,” Merkel said. “We need to continue to work on this urgently.”
The EU will support Afghanistan’s neighbors in coping with “negative spill overs,” which are to be expected from an increasing number of refugees and migrants, Josep Borrell, the EU High Representative, told reporters after a meeting of foreign ministers on Tuesday.
An early indication of the potential for disruption is in the EU boundary states of Lithuania and Poland, which have a border with Belarus. Belarusian authorities are pushing migrants arriving from the Middle East and Asia to try to enter the bloc, and Poland has sent 900 troops to the region. EU officials are convening a meeting later Wednesday to try to resolve the issue.
Macron this week warned that the Taliban victory is likely to propel a substantial flow of migrants toward Europe. This must be tackled, he said, via a united European response and by trying to contain the flow in transit countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Iran.
“Europe cannot alone confront the consequences of the present situation,” he said. “We must anticipate and protect against substantial, irregular flows of migrants which would endanger those involved and foster all sorts of trafficking.”

Merkel ally slams Washington for Afghan debacle
Bloomberg

An ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned US President Joe Biden’s decision to rapidly withdraw from Afghanistan and said the fallout would lead to a more independent defense strategy for Germany and Europe.
“Nobody asked us whether it was a good idea to leave that country in such a quick way,” Johann Wadephul, a deputy caucus leader for Merkel’s Christian Democrats in the Bundestag, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “So, the very irritating situation we now have — the chaos we are facing in Kabul — is of course the result of this.”
European officials have laid bare their frustrations with the US in the days since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, and the German lawmaker indicated the failure would have a lasting impact on transatlantic relations.
Wadephul pilloried the US withdrawal, calling it chaotic and asserting that negotiations with the Taliban’s political leadership in Doha could have continued. He also said American counterparts took little heed of input from Germany, which had the second-largest troop deployment in Afghanistan.
Norbert Roettgen, the Christian Democrat who chairs German parliament’s foreign affairs committee, also voiced similar condemnation.
“Things haven’t just gone wrong — it’s a catastrophe,” Roettgen told reporters on Wednesday ahead of a briefing on the situation in Kabul.
“It’s a moral failure of the West — and the geopolitical consequences are still difficult to discern. It’s a breaking point.”

Wadephul bluntly reinforced Merkel’s call for Germany and the European Union to take more control of security interests, a geopolitical shift away from U.S. dominance since the end of World War II.
“We have to acknowledge that the United States will no longer be the policeman of the world” and guarantee Europe’s security, Wadephul said from his Berlin office on Wednesday. “We have to do more.”