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Monday’s harrowing scenes out of Karzai airport in Kabul have given way to less-sensational, logistical challenges to completing the evacuation from Afghanistan by August 31, and the media’s verdict is clear: Can’t it still be Monday?
- At a White House press conference Friday, President Biden offered a comprehensive update on the withdrawal effort, which he noted has evacuated 13,000 citizens, allied Afghans, and others since the airlift began on August 14. Biden said he still believes the U.S. can complete the evacuation by August 31, notwithstanding operational setbacks. He acknowledged that though the Taliban has committed to allowing U.S. citizens through checkpoints into the airport, many have been stuck in bottlenecks of would-be refugees outside the gates, and that service members have thus pulled over 100 of them in over the airport walls. He also acknowledged that he can’t promise the evacuation will end without loss of life.
- The U.S. had to pause evacuation flights out of Kabul on Friday, not because too many evacuees are stranded outside the airport, but because pilots had nowhere to fly them, after Qatar refused to accept more refugees and asylum seekers. That touched off a multi-hour effort to find new destinations and clear evacuees past transit points, after which the airlift operation resumed. All of these challenges have raised questions about why we couldn’t fly non-Americans to U.S. territory, and house them there while screening them, just as we did for Vietnamese and Iraqi Kurdish refugees.
- There are other reasons 10,000-or-so people are awaiting departure. The Trump administration all but halted processing Special Immigrant Visas, creating a paperwork bottleneck when the Biden administration ramped the processing back up. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reports further that when now-ousted Afghan President Ashraf Ghani visited the White House in June, he asked Biden to slow the departure of American-allied Afghans “to avoid the destabilizing appearance of a rush for the exit.” Lastly, existing law required evacuees to pay for evacuation assistance (essentially airfare), but the government has now reportedly waived that requirement.
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Facing such a big challenge on a compressed time frame, many national political reporters want to know why Biden didn’t do a better job predicting the future.
- A diplomatic cable sent through the State Department’s internal dissent channel, and which reportedly reached Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, warned “of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the U.S.’s Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story. Astute readers will note that it is currently August 20, meaning that even those who believed the Afghan government would fall very quickly didn’t anticipate that it would actually collapse in mid-August, while the evacuation was ongoing.
- Nevertheless, journalists primed to join the pile-on over the ensuing crisis characterized the report as if it showed the Biden administration had clear warning that Kabul might fall before the evacuation was complete. The Journal reported that the memo “undercut the notion that the speed of the collapse caught the administration by surprise. Politico opined that the cable “cast perhaps the harshest light yet on the administration’s performance.”
In their haste to prove they can be tough on “both sides,” many journalists have misplaced their reading comprehension, but so far nothing we’ve learned has contradicted what we initially understood: The Afghan government collapsed faster than anticipated, requiring the ongoing evacuation to occur under Taliban control of the country. We should all hope it continues without violence and that the U.S. makes good on its obligation to those who risked their lives to help us.
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This week is the season finale of ALLCAPS on YouTube. On the finale episode, Jason and Renee discuss Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, and Jae Crowder's DMs. The show will be back in the fall but you can still expect new content on the Takeline channel in the meantime. To make sure you don’t miss out on the latest sports news, subscribe to Takeline on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Ohio’s about to try out a new redistricting process designed to prevent gerrymandering, which may or may not prevent Republicans from giving it a whirl anyway. Ohio has had one of the most gerrymandered maps in the country for the last decade, with 12 districts that reliably elect Jim Jordan & Friends and just four ludicrously-shaped blue districts. In 2018, Ohio voters approved a gerrymandering reform that requires high bipartisan support in the legislature to pass a new map. But Republicans have some incentive not to cooperate in that process: If neither the legislature nor a backup commission can reach an agreement, the GOP majority can pass a new map along party lines, which would be in place for four years instead of 10. Republicans could draw an even more gerrymandered map in that scenario. The greedier they get, though, the more likely that the courts will strike it down under the new reform, which says that maps “must not unduly favor or disfavor a party or incumbents.” In other words, we have no idea how this ends, so it’s worth keeping an eye on.
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- Florida reported 799 previously uncounted coronavirus deaths on Thursday, all but one of which occurred over the past month, as well as 15,586 more confirmed cases.
- Relatedly, the city of Orlando, FL, has asked residents to use less water because the liquid oxygen used to treat the water supply must be diverted to hospitals for coronavirus patients.
- The FBI has reportedly found little evidence that Trump allies coordinated the January 6 attack on the Capitol to overturn the election results. You know, other than Donald Trump and his allies publicly summoning a mob to the Capitol on the day of the electoral vote certification after yelling about a stolen election for weeks. Other than that.
- Rain fell on the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet for the first time on record, which climate scientists do not consider particularly great news.
- Vice President Kamala Harris will campaign for Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) in San Francisco next week, as part of a final push to turn out Democratic voters in the recall election.
- Abbott Laboratories, the maker of a popular rapid coronavirus test, laid off hundreds of workers and destroyed its extra inventory when case numbers went down, hobbling efforts to ramp up testing during the Delta surge.
- Enough Texas Democrats have returned to the House floor to achieve a quorum, allowing Republicans to advance their delayed election-subversion bill.
- Mike Richards has lost his Jeopardy! hosting gig after nine days of sustained booing, and in the wake of new reports on his ugly podcasting history. Richards will be relegated back to the toil and drudgery of his old job, executive producer of Jeopardy!.
- Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune has resigned amid an internal reckoning around racism, sexism, and abusive behavior in the organization.
- If a sea snake appears to attack you, just know that it is probably horny and confused, and try to let it down gently. ("I am already dating a different snake," etc.)
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Now that the 20-year war in Afghanistan has lurched to an end, let’s take a gander at how the next one might start! Two prominent Afghans have emerged as potential anti-Taliban resistance leaders, and could lay the groundwork for the U.S. to eventually wade back into Afghanistan in some capacity. One is Ahmed Massoud, the son of the leader of the last insurgency against the Taliban, who claims to have a growing army and stores of ammunition. The other is Amrullah Saleh, who was the vice president of Afghanistan until President Ashraf Ghani fled to the UAE this week, and who has since declared himself the country’s legitimate president. Saleh has close ties to the CIA and intelligence-gathering capabilities that will be attractive to the Biden administration. Funding Saleh as an individual to collect intelligence would be different from covertly backing proxy groups to destabilize the Taliban, which experts say President Biden isn’t likely to pursue. But down the road, a more hawkish administration could use existing intelligence-gathering relationships as a launchpad to funding an insurgency, and miring the U.S. in another war.
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Georgia now has one of the highest voter registration rates in the country, with 95 percent of voting-age Georgians registered to vote.
200 million Americans have now received at least one vaccine dose.
A federal appeals court has upheld the CDC’s eviction moratorium.
Ten girls from Afghanistan's girls robotics team have made it safely out of the country.
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