Please don’t say they are stranded, but an unknown number of Americans are still in Afghanistan awaiting an opportunity to get back to America. No one knows how many are still there, since no one knows how many were in Afghanistan when the evacuation began. I believe Jen Psaki’s most recent number was 11,000, but that was a guess.
The administration has been tight-lipped about how many Americans it has actually gotten out of Afghanistan since the debacle began, but if this information is correct, the situation is grim:
NEW: Leaked State cable with evacuation numbers (as of Aug 23 at 1500 ET):
Total manifested since midnight Kabul AUG 23: 483 AMCITS, 6,425 Afghans natls, 8 3rd country/unknown. Total = 6,916
Total manifested since op began: 4,407 AMCITS, 21,533 Afghans, 642 TCNs. Total = 26,582
— Alex Ward (@alexbward) August 24, 2021
Other items in cable:
• 128 planned flights in the next 48 hours
• Approx 13,000 people inside HKIA
• Denmark won’t temp host US SIVs
• Cyprus will host evacuees in the “low hundreds” for 30-60 days
• Netherlands to take 2k people for 60 days— Alex Ward (@alexbward) August 24, 2021
Alex Ward is a national security reporter for Politico, which makes this information either reliable or unreliable depending on your view of that publication. But I am guessing he didn’t make up the leaked cable.
If that information is correct, we probably are less than one-half way to extracting the Americans from Afghanistan. It is hard to see how that task can be accomplished by August 31, the date to which the Biden administration appears to be committed.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a nightmare from which stranded Americans are trying to awake. At this point, it doesn’t look as though anywhere near all of them are going to make it.
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