The limiting factor in evacuating Afghans right now is our refusal to fly them to US territory and finish the paperwork there. This capricious administrative decision is costing lives and has no justification beyond American xenophobia.https://twitter.com/EenaRuffini/status/1428715951185334280 …
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No one in the State Department or administration has adequately explained why the bureaucratic fan dance of processing applications has to happen in horrific conditions outside Kabul airport. We can absorb any number of refugees, and vet them for as long as we want to on Guam.
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I think we all understand the real reason—Biden thinks it's unacceptable to give random Afghans access to US courts and a chance at a new life here. So our current Afghan policy is some mix of State Department caprice and soldiers deciding which baby to lift over the razor wire.
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That last part is not bombast. It's U.S. soldiers who are again being made to enforce a craven policy decision in Afghanistan, this time by a president who makes a fetish of his capacity for empathy.pic.twitter.com/TG7NOndn5J
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So many people making excuses for the inexcusable. If only our military had the ability to move and house large numbers of people on short notice, or any place to put up a tent!
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Replying to @Pinboard
Isn't it also an issue that the East Coast-Kabul flight time is like 5x as long as the flight time from Kabul to Doha/Kuwait? Any aircraft that commits to flying from Kabul to the US is going to be off the table for over 24 hours. Seems worth mentioning...
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Replying to @TTuna402
You can stage from regional facilities like Doha, there's no need to fly people out direct. It's also ridiculous to claim that it's safer to leave them waiting outside without shelter at Kabul airport than it would be to make them do the same at a US-controlled air base.
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Replying to @Pinboard
I wouldn't be surprised if there's political hesitancy at all. I just think people are really discounting the absolutely incredible logistical challenges involved in this. Just my 2c.
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Kabul to Guam is probably like 13-14 hours too and I have no idea what the airlift situation is like, so I am hardly ready to confidently pronounce that we have the capacity to send C-17s on 26-28hr round-trips with no issues.
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If this was a logistical problem, it could be solved. The bottleneck is not the military's capacity to move people, or the lack of a place to put them, it's a political decision to minimize total numbers and at all costs keep people out of the jurisdiction of American courts
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