Updates on Afghanistan

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we return now to the recent developments in Afghanistan. It's been only a day since the Taliban overtook the city of Kabul, prompting the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, to flee. This morning videos and reports from on the ground are emerging showing thousands of Afghans rushing to the tarmac of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. In one video, Afghans are clinging to the US military aircraft as it takes off. In another even more harrowing video, a presumed person is shown falling off an aircraft already in flight. The AP reports that the chaos at the airport has killed at least seven people, according to US officials.

The deteriorating security conditions had prompted the US forces to initially suspend air operations, but CNN reported about an hour ago that they've been resumed. Though officials expect sporadic suspensions, they say, and they report the Taliban forces are trying to control crowds. The thousands rushing to the airport might not get the permission to leave, at least not to the United States. The Pentagon's press secretary, John Kirby, says the Department of Defense will evacuate up to 30,000 Afghan special immigrant visa applicants into the US.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas Greenfield, added this morning, amid calls to help the Afghan people that "the United States promises to be generous in resettling Afghans in our home country." Joining me now to discuss the latest on the situation in Afghanistan are Kristen Rouse, president and founder of the New York City Veterans Alliance and board member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and Fred Kaplan Slate's War Stories columnist, and the author of many books including his latest The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Kristen and Fred, welcome back to WNYC, I'm so sorry under these circumstances.

Fred Kaplan: Good to be here.

Kristen Rouse: Thank you for having me, Brian. It's so important to tell these stories.

Brian Lehrer: Kristen, I know you've served three tours in Afghanistan and have been there for a combined 31 months, at least, according to what I saw on CNN.

Kristen Rouse: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Your concern now is not so much, I think, for your fellow veterans at this moment though I'm sure they are suffering emotionally watching what's going on, but for the physical safety, even the lives, of so many people who helped Americans who are Afghans when you were there. Can you talk about what you know and what you fear?

Kristen Rouse: Absolutely, Brian. Veterans are struggling with and grieving this tremendous loss but we are also getting calls, messages, all of these communications from the people that we know on the ground who are asking us begging us for help. That is hard to do when there are extremely limited options right now. Even moments before I got on with your control room, I was actually on the phone with one of my interpreters who is in the United States but telling me his family are at the Kabul airport. They're seeing US troops bringing people in for flights, and he's begging me to reach somebody there to bring his family in.

I am just one of thousands of veterans who are getting these calls right now. When I woke up yesterday morning to the Taliban taking Kabul, what I felt like it was like watching the Titanic sinking, but only the crew get lifeboats and all of your friends are in the water drowning. Today, those drowning people, those drowning friends are calling us. They are calling us begging for the lifeboats. If you hear notifications in the background, I'm getting active messages from people in Afghanistan and people connected to people in Afghanistan begging for help. Veterans, there's organizations out there like No One Left Behind, like the Association of Wartime Allies, they are working nonstop, overnight, no sleep, trying to communicate with people and to help them and to keep them safe.

What we're seeing at the airport is a catastrophe. I heard from an Afghan who said that they're being shot at to clear the crowd. Taliban are controlling everything outside of the airport, and people are desperate to get out. As you mentioned, they are so desperate they're willing to die on an aircraft falling to their death. They're willing to have that death rather than be killed by Taliban. That is the choice they're having to make right now. We are not getting in enough airframes. 30,000 is a drop in the bucket. We evacuated more than 120,000 people from Vietnam after we left. We have to open airframes, we have to get flights in, we have to bring people to safety. We must bring more people to safety.

Brian Lehrer: What would be involved in doing that? Would it take further military action to basically fight our way in against resistance from the Taliban to effect those evacuations?

Kristen Rouse: Brian, we have troops at the airport right now. We have airframes. Last night, they got reportedly 800 people crammed into a C-17 cargo plane to move mostly Americans from what I could tell out of country. We have a lot of large cargo airframes in that region that have the capacity to do this. I'm not a strategic planner. I used to ship cargo for the army. I used to put cargo on the aircraft, and I know that they have a high capacity and they can fly. They can do this mission. It's a matter of is there a will? Is there a will to get people out while they are still alive? They are still alive right now, what are we doing for them? How are we getting them out?

Brian Lehrer: Fred Kaplan, Slate's War Stories columnist, can you add anything from your perspective to what is doable and what it would take to deal with the particular humanitarian crisis that Kristen is describing having to do with tens of thousands of Afghans whose lives are in danger because of the Taliban takeover, especially if they were interpreters or anything else having to do with the US and Western military forces there in the past?

Fred Kaplan: One thing that should be noted is that whatever you think about President Biden's decision to withdraw, he's had four months to prepare for this, and almost nothing was done. I remember calling a fairly senior official in May and saying, "What are you doing about evacuating the translators and so forth?" If something had been going on, it would have been visible. The military is actually very good at this. One thing that the military is very good at is logistics, but really nothing was done.

One of the very first things that was done was to shut down Bagram Airbase, which is a military airbase. The Russians built it. The Americans have been using. It had a lot more capacity and could be much more easily guarded than Kabul International Airport. That was shut down and stripped to its studs. It's hard to do much now. Unlike Vietnam which was right on the water, and you could have boats pull up, and boats can carry a lot more people than an airplane, this is a landlocked country.

I'm not really sure what can be done at this point. A lot of them are going to be taken out of the country, maybe not to the United States, but through Iran, to Turkey, maybe to Europe from there. The thing that's very clear about every aspect of this withdrawal, again, we can talk about whether that was a good idea but whether or not it was a good idea, there were 101 things that could have been done, and I only see evidence in about two or three of them having actually been done.

Brian Lehrer: I want to ask you both about reports that I've heard that are conflicting that maybe central to the fate of so many people, reports that say, on the one hand, the Taliban is promising amnesty to people who've not been with them, and that there is no apparent military violence in Kabul now that they've taken over the capital. I've also heard reports that they've already engaged in executions of surrendering Afghan soldiers and raping women and selling some women into forced marriages already in places they've taken over. Do either of you have any knowledge of anything on either side of that? Fred, I'll start with you.

Fred Kaplan: I don't have direct knowledge. I would say two things very quickly. One, any pledge by the Taliban is not worth anything. Second-- I've already forgotten the second part of your question.

Brian Lehrer: It's all right, I'll go to Kristen. Kristen, he makes an initial first point, which is just because the Taliban says it that doesn't mean it's true.

Kristen Rouse: Absolutely, Brian. The Taliban have been lying for 20 years. I would love to believe them, but based on past experience they're not reliable. What I'm hearing from folks on the ground is that Taliban are now going door to door in Kabul. What's been known for at least several days now is that they have US biometric equipment to identify any-- Through retinal scans, facial recognition, they have the ability to ID anyone who has ever worked with the US at any point, which is a huge number of Afghans. Also, keep in mind, there's humanitarian aid workers on ground. There's all of these people who have been part of building a better Afghanistan, modernizing Afghanistan, educating Afghans, caring for Afghans, all of the things that the Taliban has murdered people for these last 20 years. All of them are trying to get out. Everybody is trying to save their lives.

The Taliban are controlling checkpoints, they are able to ID people, they are going door to door. The executions we'll be ramping up by all indications. This is terrifying, it is dire and we need to get people out. Also worth noting is that the visa process, we keep talking about the SIVs for translators, so many of our translators don't even meet the stringent requirements or couldn't get through the 15 step process of getting their SIV. It is a year's long process. This is the worst bureaucratic process that we could inflict on any friend, let alone a foe.

So many haven't been able to get their SIV visa and then the new P2 visas that have been opened up that non-translators, other people who either don't qualify for the SIV or have otherwise worked within the larger US coalition or NATO effort to include aid workers, journalists, all of these other categories of people who've been part of this enterprise, the P2 process just opened and it is also terribly bureaucratic. Our embassy shut down. People can't get visas, they can't even get passports right now. Everything is shut down.

Also, banks are out of money. They can't even get money to pay for the documentation they need to be able to apply and go through all of these steps. Meanwhile, this is the Titanic sinking, they are in the water, they will drown, they will die. We need to do mass evacuations, bring them somewhere safe. You can't tell me there aren't places across the world we can fly these people to and figure out their paperwork there.

We need to preserve life. We must preserve life while they are still alive. All of the post-mortems I believe need to stop because we still have people alive and we need to get them out. Our investment of 20 years has been In Afghan people. Some of them are still alive right now. We need to preserve their lives so we can preserve our investments, even human lives for the sake of human life. Please call your electeds and tell them to preserve Afghan lives and get them out. We have the capability.

Brian Lehrer: We can take Fred after we take a break. Kristen, hang in there. We'll continue in a second as we talk about the humanitarian crisis as Kristen Rouse was just describing. She is president and founder of the New York City Veterans Alliance and board member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. She served three tours in Afghanistan, and Fred Kaplan, Slate's War Stories columnist. We can take a few phone calls at 646- 435-7280. If you have a pertinent question or comment, 646-435-7280 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Our coverage continues after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, WNYC as we continue our coverage of the crisis in Afghanistan with Kristen Rouse, president and founder of the New York City Veterans Alliance, and Fred Kaplan, who writes about the military for Slate. Nicole in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Nicole?

Nicole: Hi, Brian. A long-time listener, a second-time caller. My questions are that I'm old enough to have seen that what happened in Vietnam after we left and as we were evacuating. I know that in Afghanistan, we've been there 20 years. We have trained their troops, we have provided trillions of dollars of military equipment to their military forces. I am puzzled by the fact that they didn't seem to fight back, they seemed to abdicate to the Taliban right away.

As much compassion as I have for the preservation of life, we must remember how many thousands of lives we have sacrificed to that war of American life as well as Afghani life. There was no proper way almost to leave that country. I think the Taliban have been in existence for thousands of years or hundreds of years at least, and I'm not sure that it will ever change much.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole, I'm going to leave it there. Forgive me because I want to get some people on in our limited remaining time. Fred, I think your point earlier was it wasn't that we're leaving, it's how we're leaving and didn't plan for the logistics of the evacuation?

Fred Kaplan: Here's the point to which Nicole is addressing. The thing is that we have a tendency to build up foreign armies in America's image. For all these years, we've assisted and equipped the Afghan army, but we've integrated them into an American military structure that is greatly enhanced by but also dependent on American close air support, intelligence, logistics, helicopter, transport from one isolated part of the country to the other, medevac equipment units, supply and maintenance, repair and maintenance.

When we withdrew, all of that disappeared. Not even an American military combat unit on the ground would have been able to survive long without all those combat support equipment. We've never really learned how or figured out how to supply and equip an allied military in a way that's suitable to their own situation that differs from the way that we would do it ourselves. That's the fundamental problem.

Brian Lehrer: Let me take another call. Hassan who says he's from--

Kristen Rouse: Brian, if I could just speak to that briefly because this is something that's come up a lot. America paid me for nine months to work alongside and build capacity in the Afghan National Army, specifically the 203rd corps based in Gardezi. I can tell you for a fact that the Afghan National Army and the Afghan police forces have been fighting and dying by Taliban hands for 20 years. In June alone, which is before we abandoned Bagram Airfield in the middle of the night, in June alone, more than 700 Afghan military and security forces died fighting the Taliban.

It appears that what has happened in this Taliban overrun, we have been seeing that Afghan commanders were told that a deal was being made. There were also bases that had no food, no water, no armor. They were left out to dry, they were left hung out to dry. If you're a military commander, after all of these sacrifices, after all the hardship, after all the sacrifices of 20 years, and even longer before we got there, after all those sacrifices, do you send all of these men to suicide against a well-armed, well-planned Taliban attack that has also been materially supported by Pakistan for a very long time?

This has been a proxy war, this has been a lot of complicating issues, but the Afghan soldiers I knew were brave patriots who did not have anywhere near the supplies, the support, the armor, the weaponry that we did and they fought bravely.

Kristen Rouse: I know I saw them, I knew them. It is so hard to hear people who are just tuning in now to say, '"Oh, they didn't fight for their country," when they've been fighting for more than 20 years.

Brian Lehrer: In our remaining few minutes, I want to take a call from Hassan who says he's originally from Afghanistan, now in Patterson, New Jersey with a little different take, it sounds like, on what he thinks is going to happen now. Hassan, you are on WNYC? Hi, there. We've only got about 30 seconds for you so go for it.

Hassan: Brian, I'm going to be very fast. Thank you very much for my phone call. This is the fourth time I'm calling you regarding my country. Your both guests are completely wrong. Completely wrong. The Trump administration give Taliban ammunition because of Iran. That's number one. Pakistan has been helping Taliban from Bhutto's eras because they want to invade our country. Pakistan did not like Afghanistan ever. They feel that is part of their country so your guest is completely wrong.

Secondly, Taliban was wearing a Rolex watch when they were in the United Emirates. These are not the same Talibans. They learned their lessons. They are not going to go and rape anybody or kill anybody or what your guest said. Actually, I should thank Fred for his service. Your guest, the lady, is saying that they're going to have flyer things and none of the things that's going to happen. They learned their lessons and they're going to be misleading everybody because they're going to-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Wait, you think the Taliban is going to be more moderate in their governance than they were before 2001?

Hassan: 100% because they want to do the same thing that they used to do. Cultivating opium, cultivating terrorism. They're going to keep their facade looks good. Remember, Sunnis and Pakistanis educated these guys.

Brian Lehrer: Hassan, forgive me for cutting you off, but we're almost end of time for the show and I want to let our guests be able to respond. 30 seconds for each of you and this is going to be the last word for this portion of our coverage. Kristen, you want to go first?

Kristen Rouse: We've been hearing that assassinations are already happening. I want to be wrong, I want Afghans to live, I want all of them to have a chance. I hope I'm wrong.

Brian Lehrer: Fred?

Fred Kaplan: Pakistan has certainly been a factor. It's hard to find any insurgency that can take safe refuge in a neighboring country anytime it want. As for the other claims, we'll see. These are millennial creatures, they have no interest in joining the international system or anything like that. They're going to do what they do.

Brian Lehrer: Fred Kaplan writes the War Stories column for Slate. His latest book is The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Kristen Rouse is president and founder of the New York City Veterans Alliance and a board member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Thank you both so much for joining us.

Fred Kaplan: Thank you, Brian.

Kristen Rouse: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, as a program note, President Biden will address the country about events in Afghanistan this afternoon. We will carry NPR's live coverage starting at 3:40 this afternoon on both 93.9 FM and AM 820 WNYC.

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