Embassy tells Americans in Afghanistan to “consider” heading to the airport
BY Herschel Smith
3 years, 3 months ago
Via Hot Air, communication from what’s left of the U.S. embassy in Kabul.
U.S. government-provided flights are departing. U.S. citizens, LPRs, and their spouses and unmarried children (under age 21) should consider travelling to Hamid Karzai International Airport. You should plan to enter the airport at Camp Sullivan. From the HKIA Airport South Traffic Circle, head east for 1km and turn right on to Camp Sullivan. Please note that gates may change frequently and that we will provide updates as necessary.
THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT CANNOT ENSURE SAFE PASSAGE TO THE HAMID KARZAI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.…
Please be advised that a significant number of individuals have registered and space on these flights is available on a first come, first serve basis. You may be required to wait at the airport for a significant amount of time until space is available…
Do not call the U.S. Embassy in Kabul for details or updates about the flight. Do not travel to the airport until you have been informed by email that departure options exist. We will continue to provide periodic updates to this message.
Mike McDaniel makes this observation.
The airport in Kabul is surrounded by the city—easy for the Taliban to surround and control—and has a single runway. The Taliban has surrounded the airport. They control all access, and up to 40,000 Americans are cut off behind enemy lines, and so are innumerable nationals from allied countries. Our government has no idea how many Americans are actually there, and they’re telling them not to call, but to go to a website to “register” for permission to be evacuated and/or telling them to go to the airport(?!).
Bagram Air Base, which was everything Kabul’s airport is not—defensible–was evacuated and abandoned, and as throughout the country, all manner of military equipment including armored vehicles, fixed and rotary winged aircraft, munitions and weapons, was left behind. The Taliban own it, all of it.
I was an enlisted man in the USAF during the cold war, not a field grade officer, not a general. I run this scruffy little blog, but even I know when withdrawing from a hostile country, you first evacuate all American civilians and allies, then all native civilians and others, allies you promised to protect. Who could possibly want another hostage crisis? Then you fly out all our military equipment, everything that could in any way help our enemies, and if you can’t fly it out, you utterly destroy it. You destroy all our facilities to deny them to the enemy. Only then do you evacuate every American service member, maintaining sufficient air cover to ensure their safe evacuation. And you don’t do it all at once.
Apparently, no one inside the beltway getting “woke,” reading Karl Marx and putting on lipstick had time to learn to perform a failure modes and effects analysis, or how to do MORT (Management Oversight and Risk Tree) analysis. Or even to learn basic planning or logistics skills.
Finally, SedDef Austin says this. “I don’t have the capability to go out and extend operations currently into Kabul.” While U.S. troops are stateside sitting through gender bender classes, this chaos ensues and the SecDef hasn’t the “capability” to do anything about it.
Ponder that for a while.
A picture says everything about the state of affairs and the fear that grips the area.
On August 18, 2021 at 10:16 pm, Frank Clarke said:
There’s something I don’t understand. Did all those people just suddenly discover that the US was pulling all its troops out and abandoning Afghanistan to whoever wants it? Was there no warning that “persons at risk” should have been making plans to shake the Afghani dust from their sandals and find a nicer place to live?
It seems to me that there was talk last year — by President Trump, if I’m not mistaken — that there were plans afoot to extract all US troops from The Great Sandbox by sometime earlier this year. Was that me hallucinating? Then Biden pushed that date to sometime later in the year — to about now, I guess.
And all these people suddenly said “Omigosh! They weren’t kidding!! We should pack!” Did I get that right?
If people who are so bad at planning even weeks or days into the future suddenly find themselves “behind enemy lines”, am I required to panic along with them in a show of solidarity?
What am I missing here?
On August 18, 2021 at 11:52 pm, Archer said:
“Treason” — “levying war against the United States” or “adhering to her enemies, giving them aid and comfort”.
Consider the sheer amount of U.S. weapons, weapons systems, vehicles, drones, etc., left behind and intact and operational, when it could easily have been lifted out and/or destroyed in the same timeline, guaranteeing that functional war-fighting tools would fall into the hands of the Taliban (who declare themselves our enemy), to be used or sold to others of our enemies (to be used, reverse-engineered, and/or studied for adversarial means — i.e. how to counter or render useless).
Now consider that anyone with any clue how things work in that part of the world would have chimed in and predicted exactly what has happened — that given the power vacuum, the Taliban would roll in and through and seize control; that the Afghani armed forces do not, despite Gropey Joe’s assertions, possess the capability to maintain or use our tools without our guidance and oversight; that we have potentially tens of thousands of civilians and contractors on the ground and the DoD seemingly has no idea who, where, or even how many they are (but you can bet the Taliban, having seized the roster of armed service members, probably have a good idea) or have any plans on getting them out.
Bowe Bergdahl, IIRC, was accused of treason for deserting his post and giving some information to the enemy. Joe Biden and his top brass gave billions of dollars in weapons and vehicles — actual military aid — and an entire country to our enemies. Not just the Taliban; it’s safe to assume Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea will soon have their hands on American military tech.
The full effects of these actions won’t be felt for years to come, but this could very well be the beginning of the end of America as a world superpower.
How is that NOT treason?
On August 19, 2021 at 2:06 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Archer
Re: “‘Treason’ — ‘levying war against the United States” or ‘adhering to her enemies, giving them aid and comfort’.”
“How is that NOT treason?”
You defined it properly, and Joe Biden and company are guilty of it, without question. The trouble is we live in a nation which – to a large extent -no longer even recognizes the word or its meaning.
Don’t take my word for it: Try bringing up the subject, even amongst those known to be sympathetic to the Trad-American cause, and see where it gets you. Lots of blank stares and glazed-over eyes….
Certainly there are plenty of ordinary Americans who are honorable, ethical and upstanding people who have a moral code and try hard to live by it.
But the sad fact is that there are also millions of people in this country who no longer know or recognize those things. And that includes almost everyone in the so-called “ruling class” from which our alleged leaders are drawn. They have no honor, no ethics, and no moral principles, and nothing to which they have any allegiance – save the accumulation of wealth, power and status.
The Founders – being so well-read in the classics of the antiquity of Greece and Rome – spoke, wrote and thought a great deal about what the classical philosophers termed “virtue,” habits of thought and behavior that served as the foundation of a moral and good life.
The following appeared at the website “Sovereign Nations,” in a piece entitled ”
Founding Fathers: Without Virtue There Is No Freedom” …
Traditionally, the four “cardinal virtues” of antiquity were prudence, courage, temperance; and justice; these are repeated or echoed in the scripture. Christian theology also adds faith, hope and love.
Notice what each virtue requires: self-control; self-limitation. Indeed, the long tradition in both philosophy and theology had been to equate virtue with happiness—thus, for Jefferson, the “pursuit of happiness” meant something far closer to “freedom to pursue the good” rather than “freedom to do whatever I want.” The first makes a free society possible. The second destroys it, because to abandon the virtues always involves a violation of the integrity of the human person.
A soceity which no longer has virtue, indeed no longer even knows what it is – is one in which violations of honor like Biden’s treason will go unrecognized and therefore unpunished.
On August 19, 2021 at 11:08 am, 41mag said:
For 18mo now we’ve known we’re leaving Trashcanistan.
This isn’t unexpected, but the manner in how it was performed WAS unexpected.
This was all done intentionally to create the mess currently viewed and experienced.
The commie administration is following the plan to remove the US from the world stage.
On August 19, 2021 at 1:14 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ 41mag
Re:”This isn’t unexpected, but the manner in how it was performed WAS unexpected. This was all done intentionally to create the mess currently viewed and experienced. The commie administration is following the plan to remove the US from the world stage.”
I see the hand of the communist party mandarins in Beijing in this, or perhaps the globalists, or both… in tandem with your basic leftist hatred of the U.S. and its military.
Biden is owned by the Chinese. They wish to replace the U.S. as the preeminent power on the world stage. Not just in fact, but in perception as well. To do that, they must inflict as humiliating a defeat upon us as possible, in as-overt-a-manner as possible.This fiasco qualifies on both counts.
The strength of the U.S. military has long-vexed Chinese planners seeking ways of cutting us down to size. Gulf War One was a wake-up call to them how much work remained to be done in that department. What better way to destroy or at least severely-damage our armed forces than by grinding them down in an endless war of attrition lasting twenty years and costing $2 trillion dollars?
And it isn’t just the military proper which is tired of the place; the same goes for the American public, which quit paying attention years ago.
It is speculation to say that the PRC are behind (or partly so) our presence in the ‘Stan, but at the very least, they would have had the motive for involving us in such a destructive quagmire. Death by a thousand cuts and so forth.
The globalist billionaires regard(ed) the U.S. military both as a possible obstacle to their plans, and also as a tool to be co-opted for their purposes until they could complete its transformation into an ideologically-reliable institution.
Afghanistan – and other interventions internationally – served these ends as well. Now that the military is “woke,” there’s no need to keep them sequestered over there, as Biden and company may have use for them elsewhere. And undoubtedly, the Chinese don’t want them anywhere near Taiwan, in case they decide to move against that nation in the near-term future.
On August 19, 2021 at 1:48 pm, Herschel Smith said:
@Georgiaboy61,
There has been much speculation along this line. Like you, because the claims are so outlandish and ridiculous (we don’t have the capability to respond), I suspect there’s more than meets the eye going on here.
On August 22, 2021 at 8:51 am, Pat H. Bowman said:
Frank asked, “What am I missing here?” I was just thinking the same thing last night. While I’ve never been an operator who operates operationally downrange, I do possess a reasonable amount of common sense. I live where the power goes out occasionally, so I have a generator and a store of gasoline. We get ice storms, so we’re stocked up on food. I feel like if I lived and worked in a 3rd world, unstable country and the US announced that it would be leaving in 15 months, I’d probably have worked out a exit plan. And a backup plan. And a backup, backup plan. With a few contingency plans thrown in for good measure.
While part of me feels a little bad for the American civilians who are stuck there, it’s more than a little bit on them. This wasn’t a surprise retreat. And for the Afgans whom we spent 20 years and billions of dollars training, and for whom we left 28 billion dollars worth of kit for them to defend themselves with, only to watch them drop it like a hot potato and run, well, they will reap what they sowed. If you’re not willing to fight for your country, don’t ask me to do it for you.