U.S. Embassy Kabul: “Because of potential security threats outside the gates at Kabul airport, we’re advising U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to the airport and to avoid airport gates at this time unless you receive individual instructions from a U.S. government rep to do so.”
Paul Plante says
“Corn Pop” City – it ain’t too pretty!
And this is exactly what some ninety or a hundred million or more people all over the world elected Joe Biden to do – make a real big ******* mess out of everything the fool touches, because like those who voted for him and put him in office, he is an incompetent fool, and always has been, which is why he has been a hack politician all his adult life instead of holding down a real job.
Paul Plante says
What a mess the Democrats and Joe Biden and all the fools who put him in office have created!
Consider the New York Times article just out entitled “Biden Defends Evacuation as Thousands Besiege Kabul Airport” by Mark Landler on 22 August 2021, as follows:
LONDON — The desperate scenes at the Kabul airport reverberated around the world on Friday, forcing President Biden to defend his handling of the chaotic evacuation and fueling recrimination from American allies that are struggling to get their own citizens out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
“We’re acting with dispatch,” Mr. Biden said at the White House.
“Any American who wants to come home, we will get you home.”
The president’s reassuring words, however, conflicted jarringly with the grim reality in Kabul, where panic reigned and the Taliban encircled the airport in a ring of terror.
While Mr. Biden pledged not to abandon American citizens or Afghans who helped the United States, he left untold others in a dangerous limbo, conceding, “I cannot promise what the final outcome will be.”
Thousands of Afghans continued to besiege the airport gates, begging to get on planes as Taliban militants menaced them with sticks and rifle butts.
Many more people were simply turned away, repulsed by reddish clouds of tear gas and volleys of rifle fire above their heads.
While the south side of the airfield — the site of anguished scenes earlier in the week — was calmer on Friday, a witness reported that the gate at the north side, where American troops are in control, was mobbed.
American-trained Afghan special forces units pushed back the crowds, some shooting in the air.
The staccato pops of gunfire mixed with the roar of planes taking off.
On the airport’s eastern perimeter, hundreds of Afghans jostled with British soldiers as they tried to get into a British-controlled compound.
In video posted to social media by the BBC, troops ordered people away from the entrance.
Footage showed a soldier hurling a man to the ground.
“It is impossible to get to the airport — if you keep going and pushing, you may get shot dead and lose your life,” one Afghan man said on Friday.
“I saw a teenage girl trampled yesterday.”
“She was dead, and her father was crying.”
The man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared for his safety, said he had tried and failed six times in recent days to reach the airport
Mr. Biden said the United States was communicating with Taliban officials to guarantee safe passage for those who wanted to leave.
But many people are hiding in their homes, fearful of reprisals if they were captured by militants.
In one case, the United States dispatched three helicopters to pick up 169 Americans who had gathered at a hotel near the airport.
They had intended to walk the 200 yards to the airfield, but local commanders, concerned about a crowd at the gate, decided to send the CH-47 helicopters, which loaded the passengers and made the short hop to the airfield without incident, said John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman.
While the president spoke of the heartbreak of the past week and said there would be plenty of time for “criticism and second-guessing,” he was defiant that leaving Afghanistan now was the right move.
The bottleneck at the airfield threatened to set off another humanitarian crisis.
Relief agencies are struggling to bring food, medicine and other urgently needed supplies into Afghanistan, according to officials.
“We are running out of supplies and scrambling now to see how we can get the next shipment in,” said Richard Brennan, the regional emergencies chief of the World Health Organization.
As tragic as are the images of people clinging to a departing American plane, he said, “the bigger humanitarian picture has been lost in all this.”
Thousands of human rights activists were stranded, some sheltering with friends and moving every day to avoid arrest by the Taliban.
Still, the devastating aftermath of the Taliban takeover continues to ripple through Washington, London and other capitals — and the finger pointing has begun.
In London, the foreign minister, Dominic Raab, came under fierce criticism for delegating a phone call to the Afghan foreign minister last weekend to a subordinate, while he was on vacation in Crete.
The opposition Labour Party accused Mr. Raab of dereliction of duty and demanded he resign.
Mr. Raab’s apparent lack of involvement crystallized a sense in Britain that their leaders were asleep at the wheel — a striking turn for a NATO member that contributed more troops to the Afghan war than any but the United States.
It has also hardened feelings toward the United States, which barely consulted its ally about the timing or logistics of the withdrawal.
British newspapers pointed out that Mr. Biden did not take a call from Prime Minister Boris Johnson until Tuesday, days after Britain requested it.
Some British diplomats said they could not recall a time when an American president came under harsher criticism than Mr. Biden has in recent days.
“It shows that Biden wasn’t that desperate to get the prime minister’s input on the situation,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington.
“It’s all escalated a bit.”
“It’s not a great sign.”
Paul Plante says
According to the news this morning, there was a fire fight at the airport in Kabul overnight, and six or seven people got crushed in the press of people trying to escape the chaos the DEMOCRAT goofball Joe Biden has created in Afghanistnam.
Paul Plante says
REUTERS
“Firefight involving Western forces erupts amid Kabul airport evacuation chaos”
Reuters
August 23, 2021
Twenty people have been killed in the chaos at the airport, most in shootings and stampedes in the heat and dust, penned in by concrete blast walls, as U.S. and international forces try to evacuate their citizens and vulnerable Afghans.
One person was killed in Monday’s clash, the German military said.
On Sunday, Taliban fighters beat back crowds at the airport a day after seven Afghans were killed in a crush at the gates as the deadline for the withdrawal of foreign troops approaches.
Biden said U.S. troops might stay beyond their Aug. 31 deadline to oversee the evacuation.
But a Taliban leadership official said foreign forces had not sought an extension and it would not be granted if they had.
The chaos at the airport is also disrupting shipments of aid going in to Afghanistan.
The World Health Organization said 500 tonnes of medical supplies due to be delivered this week were stuck because Kabul airport was closed to commercial flights, Richard Brennan, WHO regional emergency director for the Eastern Mediterranean Region, told Reuters.