With the bumbling and coldness of the Biden Administration on full display, an all-volunteer group of American veterans of the Afghan war launched a mission on Wednesday night dubbed the “Pineapple Express” to gather and move hundreds of at-risk Afghan elite forces and their families to safety.
The group worked unofficially with the United States military and U.S. embassy to move people inside the wire of the U.S. military-controlled side of Hamid Karzai International Airport.
As of Thursday morning, the group said it had brought as many as 500 Afghan special operators, assets, and enablers and their families into the airport in Kabul overnight, handing them each over to the protective custody of the U.S. military.
Paul Plante says
And meanwhile, back in Afghanistan now that Joe Biden has skedaddled:
“Saratoga County woman desperate to get sister out of Afghanistan”
Steve Hughes, Albany, New York Times Union
Sep. 2, 2021
Razia believed in the United States’ work in Afghanistan, dedicating herself to the mission of women’s education and promoting democracy in her country.
Today, she can’t leave her home in Kabul out of fear that her work and trust in the U.S. government’s efforts to rebuild Afghanistan will get her killed.
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Does Joe Biden even know her name, or care?
Getting back to that story, it continues as follows:
Meanwhile, her youngest sister, Tahira, the only family member in America, is working desperately to get Razia and the rest of the family out of Afghanistan.
Razia was just 12 when the Taliban regime fell in 2001.
She is among the generation of women who grew up with freedoms few Afghan women had known previously.
Through her school, she got a job with the U.S. Agency for International Development working for a program that promoted democracy and women’s education.
She went door to door asking families if they had young girls who weren’t in school.
Thanks to her efforts, between 200 and 250 young girls received an education.
Now the family is running short on food and medicine and Razia is one of thousands of Afghans who were unable to flee the country as the Afghan government collapsed in the face of a Taliban resurgence last month.
On Wednesday, a senior State Department official admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. left behind the majority of Afghan allies who had applied for visas to escape reprisal from the Taliban.
Since the evacuation of U.S. forces and the fall of the Afghan government, the 32-year-old woman goes into hiding every time someone knocks on the door to her family’s home.
She fears that Taliban soldiers are there to take her away for working with the U.S. government.
Her family believes she will be killed outright or forced into marriage with a Taliban soldier if she is found.
The rest of the family talked about trying to emigrate to the United States but Razia wanted to stay.
She believed in her civil-rights activism and work to make sure young Afghan girls got an education.
“She was interested in staying in Kabul to make changes there, she was not interested in coming overseas,” Reza said.
Now it’s unclear if Tahira will ever see her sister again.
The family has plenty of reasons to fear the Taliban, according to Reza and Tahira.
In addition to Razia’s work with USAID and the news agency, their family is Shia Muslim.
The Taliban follow an extremist version of Sunni Islam, the religion’s dominant sect, and refuse to tolerate religious minorities.
Last month, Razia’s brother and his wife were attacked while visiting a family friend’s home.
They haven’t been seen since.
The family has tried everything.
Tahira’s mother and nephew twice tried to brave Taliban checkpoints to reach the Kabul airport in hopes of finding a way to get the family on a flight out of the country.
They couldn’t get through.
On one trip, Taliban soldiers beat her mother with sticks.
Tahira and her in-laws have called the State Department, left messages with a hotline for Afghans who worked with the United States and reached out to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office.
But messages aren’t returned or they are not offered assistance.
Schumer’s office essentially told them there was nothing that could be done, Reza said.
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And doesn’t that sound so much like a Democrat to say that, and my goodness, of course it does.
Love ’em and leave ’em is the Democrat way.
Promise them the sun, the moon and the stars, and then leave them at the alter, which takes us back to that story of a casualty of Joe Biden’s war in Afghanistan, to wit:
The family is also in touch with attorney Seth Leech, a partner at Whiteman Osterman & Hanna, who works on immigration issues.
Leech said the family doesn’t have many options.
Making matters more complicated is that the U.S. has withdrawn its embassy staff, making visa applications difficult, if not impossible.
“I don’t know what could be done for her,” he said.
“She’s one of those people who basically said, ‘Wow, the U.S. here.”
“Now I feel protected to be a women’s rights advocate,’… and now we’re gone, and that protection is gone.”
The U.S. government’s failure to protect Afghans like Razia who supported the U.S. and promoted civil rights in Afghanistan is inexplicable, he said.
“We have an absolute responsibility to help these people because our pullout has essentially deprived them of the safety that allowed them to pursue these efforts,” he said.
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However, is is not our pullout, it is Joe Biden’s pullout, and this is all on him, not the American people who were no part of his decision-making process.