As America completes a hard exit from Afghanistan, several hundred U.S. citizens remain in the country still seeking a way out from the brutal Taliban fate that may await them. The last plane to leave Kabul took off yesterday leaving behind the Taliban claiming victory and driving U.S. military equipment around the streets of the Afghan capital.
The optics were not good, and some point back to another world superpower exiting the same country back in 1989 as an example of how difficult and deadly this region of the world can be.
Taken with a night vision device from a side window of the C-17 transport plane, the ghostly green and black image of the general striding toward the aircraft waiting on the tarmac at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Airport was released by the Pentagon hours after the United States ended its 20-year military presence here in Afghanistan.
As a moment in history, the image of Donahue’s departure could be cast alongside that of a Soviet general, who led an armoured column across the Friendship Bridge to Uzbekistan, when the Red Army made its final exit from Afghanistan in 1989.
In contrast, the images of General Boris Gromov, commander of Soviet Union’s 40th Army in Afghanistan, show him walking arm-in-arm with his son on the bridge across the Amu Darya river carrying a bouquet of red and white flowers.
The U.S. and Soviet withdrawals from a country that has become known as a graveyard for empires were conducted in very different ways, but at least they avoided the calamitous defeat suffered by Britain in the First Anglo-Afghan war in 1842.
The image, referred to by this Reuters story above, is of Major General Chris Donahue, commander of the storied 82nd Airborne Division, the last U.S. soldier to board the last flight out of Kabul:
As the last planes left, no American citizens made it on board despite many in the country still trying to find a way back home. The Biden administration is aware of the pleas for assistance and claims to still be working on helping the remaining number of citizens make a safe return back to U.S. soil:
The administration doesn’t know exactly how many Americans remain. “We believe there are still a small number of Americans, under 200 and likely closer to 100, who remain in Afghanistan and want to leave. We’re trying to determine exactly how many,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday.
U.S. military forces oversaw the evacuation of about 6,000 Americans in recent weeks, and the Biden administration insists the U.S. is committed to Americans who still want to leave Afghanistan.
At this point, the Biden administration is essentially negotiating with the Taliban for the safe passage of Americans to exit the country without harm. What those negotiations look like is unclear, but they apparently will be very “aggressive” according to Blinken:
“I think we’re also going to negotiate very hard, very aggressively, to get our other Afghan partners out. The military phase is over, but our desire to bring these people out remains as intense as it was before.”
He also pointed out that reaching the airport safely will be difficult: “I think the terror threat’s going to be very high. And I don’t want to minimize that.”
The thought of the U.S. negotiating with the Taliban for the safe return of Americans is chilling, but that is the situation the Biden administration has created. The tumult will last for years as the ramifications of the U.S. withdrawal continue to reverberate.
The Taliban is claiming victory and promising “security” for the Afghan people, whatever that means for them:
Taliban leaders later symbolically walked across the runway, marking their victory while flanked by fighters of the insurgents’ elite Badri unit.
“The world should have learned its lesson and this is the enjoyable moment of victory,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a livestream posted by a militant.
Later speaking to Al-Jazeera Arabic on the airport’s tarmac, Mujahid rejected having a caretaker government and insisted that Kabul remained safe.
“There will be security in Kabul and people should not be concerned,” he said.
The end of this book won’t be written for years to come and the Biden administration will be dealing with the fallout of this withdrawal for the foreseeable future.
