National Review Online reports (from behind a pay wall, unfortunately) on the problems that 116 U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents and SIV holders, including 59 children, have encountered in escaping from Afghanistan – problems not with the Taliban but with their own government.
A group of more than 100 U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who escaped from Afghanistan on Tuesday are being held in custody in the Abu Dhabi airport after American agencies denied their charter flight’s entry into the U.S., according to leaders of Project Dynamo, a civilian rescue organization.
What was apparently the first evacuation flight allowed by the Taliban took off from Kabul yesterday, bound for Abu Dhabi and thence by charter flight to New York.
When asked how they got the okay from the Taliban, Stern would only say “carefully.” He said that by design he refuses to work with criminal organizations, or other “bad or negative or otherwise complicated” groups, but instead worked with people who got the Taliban’s sign-off on the flight through intermediaries.
We may infer that baksheesh changed hands, showing that corruption isn’t an unalloyed evil.
“We had the flights all set up. We understood we had clearance all the way through, into the United States, with permissions to land,” said Stan Bunner, a lawyer and another member of Project Dynamo who has helped organize the operation from his home in Naples, Fla. . . .
“They say a charter of our size and type cannot bring Americans to America from an international location,” Stern said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
There also were concerns about measles, though Stern and Bunner said all of the people being rescued have been vaccinated for measles and COVID-19.
Project Dynamo was then able to obtain permission to fly to Washington, D.C. Then that clearance was revoked, and they were informed “that this airplane with this manifest is banned from all U.S. ports of entry”.
While the group waits (it now has permission to fly to Chicago on a commercial flight tomorrow), conditions in Abu Dhabi are doubtless better than in Kabul, but not terrific.
“They put everybody in like an airplane hangar, in a passenger terminal thing,” Stern said of the authorities in Abu Dhabi. “We are in custody, surrounded by cops with guns. We cannot leave. We cannot do anything. We don’t have our bags. No one here has showered in like four days. We are in this weird spot. We’re in transit, but we can’t leave.”
In response to an inquiry from National Review, the Department of Homeland Security responded with bureaucratic bafflegag. Maybe it has just been, as it claims, enforcing “the established safety, security, and health protocols”. If so, it’s obvious that the Biden Administration doesn’t attach a particularly high value to getting our countrymen out of hostile territory.
Perhaps Project Dynamo should have said that it was bringing in refugees from Haiti.
Update (October 1, 2021): The escapees from Afghanistan arrived safely in Chicago yesterday. Happily, the U.S. government, after barring their charter flight from American air space and otherwise slowing their return, paid the cost of a commercial flight.
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