750 Americans Evacuated out of Afghanistan today, while Up To 40,000 Remain Stranded

By Yehudit Garmaise

      The Taliban remains firmly in control of Afghanistan: almost 20 years after the September 11 attacks that sparked two decades of what many call the “endless war.”  

     Yesterday, President Joe Biden defended his withdrawal from Afghanistan of U.S. troops, who have been there for 20 years: since days after the attacks on the US on Sept. 11, 2001, when Afghanistan was thought to be harboring many terrorists, including Osama Bin Laden.

     “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” said the president, who noted that while terrorist forces were rooted in Afghanistan 20 years ago, many terrorist cells are more diffusely spread in different regions of the Middle East.

     “I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country’s civil war, taking casualties, suffering life-shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss,” President Biden said yesterday. “This is not in our national security interest.”

      While Biden’s arguments make sense, some say that this week’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan is messier and more poorly executed than President Richard Nixon’s 1973 withdrawal from Saigon, South Vietnam, which immediately fell to North Vietnam’s Communist regime.

     In addition to the cache of weapons that American troops seemed to have hastily just left for the Taliban to pick up and use, 10,000 to 40,000 American diplomatic, translators, journalists, and others are thought to be left in Afghanistan with no way to get out.

      Only 150 Americans were evacuated out of Kabul yesterday, and 700 Americans out of Kabul’s international airport today, as thousands of Afghans who helped coalition forces are also left stranded in the city because what many are saying was the absence of a viable exit strategy on the part of the president and his intelligence advisers.

      “Most are scrambling to escape,” Josh Rogin told the Washington Post. “Some are dual nationals or children of Americans who may not have the proper passport or visas, but the State Department has not told them how to fix their paperwork.

     On Sunday, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that he had repeatedly told the Biden administration that the United States' top focus in Afghanistan should be on safely getting out of the country the U.S. personnel who supported the United States and the brave Afghans who helped our soldiers.

     Yesterday, the president said that the US’s current mission was to deploy 6,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan “to assist in the departure of U.S. and allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan, and to evacuate our Afghan allies and vulnerable Afghans to safety outside of Afghanistan.”

    As soon as the US troops, 832,000 of whom, plus 25,100 more Defense Department civilians, have served in the region since 2001, however, started to withdrawal from their presence that was aimed at protecting both the country and American and its allies from the terrorists that the country harbored, within 10 days, Taliban militants easily captured dozens of provincial capitals, which were caught off guard.

      Many of the Afghanis who are left in the country, particularly women, who are the most vulnerable under the Taliban’s regime, are scared to leave their homes after the brutal regime of the Taliban has taken over the government and forced out the country’s former President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, who yesterday fled his country with a helicopter full of cash.

      Some women told CNN, whose female reporters have had to cover up with head-to-toe burquas to continue covering the area, told reporters that they were not sure how they would get out to buy the burqas that the Taliban requires, or cope with the regime's other rules, such as one that requires male relatives to accompany women whenever they want to leave their homes.

      Taliban leader Zabihullah Mujahid, however, has claimed that women can have rights, can work, and can get educated, as long as those women live by Shariah Law.

     The return of mandatory burquas to the women of Afghanistan, however, signals to them a sudden and devastating loss of the rights to work, study, move, and live in peace, CNN reported.

      Before the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban, which ruled the country from 1996 to 2001, had closed girls' schools, banned women from working, and allowed many acts of violence against women.

     The presence of US troops helped to ease the many restrictions on women, on whose behalf, many international groups and donors worked to provide legal protections.

     When he spoke yesterday, the president blamed not only the Afghans, on whom Americans have spent $1 trillion and 20 years attempting to train and empower, for failing to fight off the advancing Taliban, but Biden also pointed his finger at former President Donald Trump, who had drastically reduced the American military presence in Afghanistan from 15,500 troops down to 2,500 troops during his term, for forging a peace agreement that promised that U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, which Biden said he postponed because he had just recently entered office.

       Many military officials, however, have said that Biden “waited too long” to evacuate non-military Americans before completely withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan.

     Although Brig. Gen. Ansgar Meyer, the last commander of the German troops who also just left Afghanistan told his soldiers, “We have worked long and hard to stand here today.

     “As your commander, I can say for you: Mission accomplished. You have fulfilled your task.”

    The top American general in Afghanistan, however, warned reporters about how the Taliban has rapidly taken over so many districts in the country, which, he said, could soon descend into civil war.

 (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)