The Biden Administration is turning to the Pentagon's Civil Reserve Air Fleet program to get commercial jetliners into Kabul in order to airlift Americans and Afghan refugees out of Afghanistan.
President Biden said Sunday that the U.S. military is “executing a plan” to move stranded American citizens to the Kabul airport in greater numbers, including through an expansion of a safe zone around the facility and by creating conduits for people to access the compound “safely and effectively.”
“Our first priority in Kabul,” Biden said in remarks at the White House, “is getting American citizens out of the country as quickly and as safely as possible.”
The president would not say how the plan for “increased rational access to the airport” is being carried out or whether U.S. troops have expanded their perimeter outside the airport and further into Kabul, which could put them at heightened risk of attack from Taliban factions manning security checkpoints and Islamic State operatives who, U.S. officials warn, pose a serious threat.
In recent days, the Qatari ambassador to Afghanistan has escorted small groups of Americans into the airport, according to two people familiar with the effort who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation. American citizens have been instructed to meet at rally points in the city, and the ambassador then accompanies them to guarantee safe passage, these people said. Qatar has served as an intermediary between the United States and the Taliban at several stages of the American withdrawal, sponsoring peace talks and serving as the first point of refuge for many evacuees.
The operational shift comes as U.S. commanders gear up for what officials hope will be a dramatic acceleration of evacuations from Afghanistan in the coming days, enlisting domestic commercial airliners and a number of foreign allies to aid the effort.
Evacuations had slowed over the past couple days, as backlogs in way stations like Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar prevented planeloads of people from departing Kabul, grounding planned flights out and degrading humanitarian conditions at the already overcrowded airport.
The addition of 18 commercial airplanes — activated, the Pentagon announced Sunday, as part of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet — is intended to address those bottlenecks. The jetliners, contracted from domestic airlines United, American, Atlas, Delta, Omni and Hawaiian, will not be flown into Kabul, but used instead to move those taken to places like Qatar on to other destinations in Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Persian Gulf. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier in the weekend that 13 countries had pledged to temporarily host evacuees, while an additional 12 had agreed to serve as transit points.
Biden said Sunday that the mobilization represented a “first stage,” leaving the possibility that more flights could be added to the effort.
On Saturday, the U.S. military operated 14 evacuation flights that took about 3,900 people out of the country, while 35 other planes evacuated approximately the same number, according to White House and Pentagon officials. That’s up twofold from Friday — but still short of the 5,000 to 9,000 people per day that senior military officials have said they have the capability to evacuate themselves.
Biden's still wisely being intentionally cagey about operational security, as he should be, but it's excellent that we're bringing in more airliners to get more people out more quickly. It's a move that makes sense and will work, and hopefully these additional planes will be pressed into service in a matter of days, if not sooner.
We still have thousands of Americans in Afghanistan, and for now, the US is working to get them out. That's a good thing. When something like this goes bad, well, some of my earliest memories are of the news counting the hundreds of days that US hostages were held in Iran in 1980.
Earlier estimates said the upper limit on how many people could be evacuated per day was between 5,000 and 9,000. The fact that the US flew out ~10,400 over a 24-hour period is important. https://t.co/nqCqFIcHEe
— Steve Benen (@stevebenen) August 23, 2021
The takeaway here is that Biden is getting the job done, despite all the howling from the GOP and the media.
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