The official said they did not have a specific count of Afghan special immigrant (SIV) applicants and family members who did not arrive on the evacuation flights, “but would say it is most of them, only based on in anecdotal information about populations we have been able to support “.
More generally, the officer described an evacuation effort in the face of numerous challenges: one that left U.S. officials working on the ground “obsessed with the decisions we had to make and the people we didn’t. to be able to help get out in this first phase of the operation “.
“It wasn’t nice. It was very difficult,” the senior official said, “and it involved some really painful compensation and some decisions for everyone involved.”
There were at least 20,000 SIV applicants at the pipeline prior to the U.S. withdrawal, and the State Department has not provided a specific count of how many of the 123,000 evacuees from Afghanistan fall into this category.
The State Department official told reporters that in the early stages of the evacuation, the United States tried to prioritize access for late-stage SIV applicants and other categories, but said the effort failed because “all credentials we attempted to provide electronically were immediately disseminated to the widest possible pool.”
“We just didn’t have the people or the time to be able to try to get through the people asking for access,” the official said.
“Every day was a constant effort of improvisation to find out what was going to work that day,” they said. “As we deepened the process, unfortunately we had to start giving priority to the people to whom we had a legal obligation in the first place, and that was our American fellow citizens. Because we had space, space and capacity to managing other populations, I tried a lot. “
“Unpredictable”
The officer spoke of the difficult physical access points to the airport, the flow of ISIS-K threats, the viral communications that caused huge gangs of Afghans to be identified for a priority group, and the poor characterization by outside groups of people trying to get to the airport.
They also said that the Taliban had “variable” criteria for the passage of their checkpoints at the airport, criteria that were sometimes “incompatible with … the guarantees they had given us that would allow the passage of certain people.” .
“Despite our best efforts to come up with a day-to-day, sometimes hour-by-hour approach that would allow groups to pass, it was unpredictable if they could really pass,” an official told reporters on Wednesday.
Although General Frank McKenzie, the head of the U.S. Central Command, described the Taliban as “very pragmatic and very entrepreneurial,” the top State Department official said pragmatism was “focused on ensuring that we would be able to leave the schedule that our President had set and that we would not be late or offer reasons why we should stay longer than August 31. “
They said the idea of the U.S. handing the Taliban a “holistic list” of SIV applicants and other vulnerable Afghans who wanted to leave the country “is incorrect,” but that they “provided a couple of opportunities” manifestos of bus to try to facilitate the passage of these vehicles through the Taliban checkpoints.
“It was about providing a certain degree of confidence that the Afghans who were on these buses were, in fact, Afghans who worked locally with staff from our diplomatic mission or other allied diplomatic missions, who were holders of foreign passports, of so that in some cases dual nationality, in other cases, native citizens of those particular countries, and in some other cases that were individuals for whom we had a particular interest and wanted to facilitate the exit of, ”they explained.
“When it worked well, and it did for a couple of days, for periods, it allowed us to move around the checkpoints, thousands of people that we and NATO allies and partners were looking for to leave,” they said. to say.
However, the official acknowledged that there were also days when it did not work well.
“We had a couple of cases where the buses were a mix of foreign nationals and Afghan local employees from other missions, and the (Taliban) only let foreigners in, and the Afghan citizens moved away or stayed in that place. that they were in that particular movement, ”they said. “In some of these cases, we were able to successfully persuade them to allow this group to move forward in the days to come.”
The State Department official spoke of the anguish many of those working on the ground felt in trying to save as many people as they could in the rushed last days of the U.S. presence on the ground.
The president of the joint states, General Mark Milley, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that he feels “pain and anger” to see what has happened in Afghanistan “over the past 20 years and the last 20 days.”
In addition to the thousands of vulnerable Afghans who arrived on the evacuation flights, there is also a group of U.S. citizens who were not evacuated by Monday’s retreat.
McKenzie told reporters Monday, “We didn’t get everyone we wanted out.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday that the United States was committed to removing these vulnerable Americans and Afghans from the country.
“We have worked hard to evacuate and relocate the Afghans who worked alongside us and we have a particular risk of retaliation. We have come out of it a lot, but many are still there. We will continue to work to help them. Our commitment to them is endless. “, he said.