The Pentagon held a briefing today on the process of evacuation of Kabul. Major Gen. Hank Taylor, Deputy Director of the Joint Staff for Regional Operations, and Defense Department spokesman John Kirby took questions. They reported that in the past week, 17,000 people have been evacuated from Kabul, of whom 2,500 were Americans. They described the entire process in euphemistic terms of being “fluid and dynamic,” and of “being up against time and space.”
There are multiple destinations for the U.S. flights out of Kabul, including Ramstein, Germany; Dulles International Airport, Virginia; Ft. Bliss, Texas; Doha, Qatar; Bahrain, and elsewhere, and things are still getting jammed up. The State Department has been contacting nations to take in Afghanis, at least on a temporary transit basis, and reports 12 nations have agreed. In Kabul and onward, the flow has to be “metered” said the Pentagon, because of logistical jam ups.
Regarding meeting the goal of soon evacuating 15,000 remaining Americans and Afghanis from Afghanistan, “that is not a perfect figure,” the briefers demurred.
President Biden himself held his first formal press conference Aug. 20, and responded to questions, including the hot button one, demanding why U.S. military forces are not active outside the perimeter of Kabul airport. He replied, “Just yesterday, among the many Americans we evacuated, there were 169 Americans who, over the — we got over the wall into the airport using military assets,” he said
Later at the Pentagon’s Aug. 20 briefing, John Kirby dilated on the incident. “[T]he original plan was for the Americans to gather themselves up at the Baron [Hotel] [less than a half-mile from the airport] and walk through the Abbey gate,” at the southeastern corner of the airport grounds, “but there was a large crowd established outside the Abbey gate — a crowd, that, that not everybody had confidence in, in terms of their ability to walk through it. And so, local commanders on the scene took the initiative and flew these helicopters out there to pick them up.” Three Army CH-47 Chinooks fetched the Americans from a landing zone at the hotel, Kirby said, then dropped them at the airport for processing.
