The Taliban hostage crisis

 Noah Rothman:

America has been held hostage before. In 1976, TWA Flight 355 was taken over by Croatian nationalists, and a New York City police officer lost his life in an effort to resolve it. The 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro by militants with the Palestinian Liberation Front ended only following American military intervention. Most famously, the vanguard of the Islamic revolution in Iran took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. These traumatic episodes pale in comparison to what the United States may now be facing in Afghanistan. America may now be in the middle of the largest hostage crisis in its history.

On Monday, the Biden administration announced that it had ferried at least 37,000 people out of the increasingly inhumane conditions that prevail in Hamid Karzai International Airport—the last remaining bastion of Western influence in Afghanistan. That’s no small feat. But insofar as you can call the herculean conscription of both civilian and military forces into the effort to evacuate Americans and their partners from behind Taliban lines “easy,” that was the easy part. The clock is ticking down to zero hour, and the United States will not meet its deadline.

“We’re going to get everyone that we can possibly evacuate evacuated,” Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin promised late last week. “And I’ll do that as long as we possibly can until the clock runs out or we run out of capability.” That “clock” had been set not just by the president, who has insisted that the United States would remove all vulnerable Americans and U.S. allies from Afghanistan by August 31, but the Taliban. “It’s a red line,” said Taliban representative Suhail Shaheen. “If the U.S. or U.K. were to seek additional time to continue evacuations, the answer is no. Or there would be consequences.”

In the effort to speed things along, the United States has reluctantly begun executing special forces operations designed to exfiltrate Americans outside of the airport, even at the risk of inflaming tensions with the Taliban and their State Department-designated terrorist allies who are providing for our “security.” Simultaneously, American forces are reportedly turning away Afghans eligible for evacuation and relocation. But even abandoning our allies to prioritize Americans will not cut it. As of Monday, only about 3,300 of the estimated 10 to 15,000 Americans who were trapped in Afghanistan when Kabul fell have been ferried out of the country. Even at this unsustainable pace, the American mission in Afghanistan will not be over by August 31. And everyone but the Biden White House seems to know it.
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The fact that it took this long to proactively use the special forces to get people out tells you something about how disorganized this effort has been. Our allies were doing it for days before this effort started.  The leadership from the Biden administration and the military has been abysmal.  This is on top of the goofy planning that included getting the military out, before getting the civilians out and closing Bagram AFB which would have been a more defensible base for doing the exfiltration.  The people in charge of the DOD for the Biden administration as well as the Joint Chiefs owe the US an explanation for their failure.

Only 26 % of Americans approve of Biden's handling of the withdrawal.  I am surprised it is that high.

See, also:

White House asks reporters to help coordinate evacuations as Afghan deadline looms