There is no way to evacuate this many people without pain and loss, of heartbreaking images you see on television. It would have been true if we had started a month ago or a month from now. President Joe Biden on Sunday, when evacuation imagery started showing up on every major news network.īiden: Let me be clear: The evacuation of thousands of people from Kabul is going to be hard and painful no matter when it started and when we began. has airlifted more than that in less than two weeks this time around-flying more than 100,000 people out of Kabul and away from the Taliban and the ISIS affiliate there. That evacuation took about three weeks and airlifted as many as 80,000 who fled Vietnam. Army photographer, the imagery from Kabul’s airport was incomparably more vivid than the black and white photos of the American exit from Vietnam in late April 1975, when dozens of evacuees were photographed streaming into a small helicopter on a rooftop in Saigon. There have been many tragic and lasting images that have come from Afghanistan and its desperate people over just the past 12 days.įor me, as a former U.S. Air Force planes, with at least two young men falling to their death when they could not hold on any longer. 15 revealed as much: Afghans clinging to the side of U.S.

Desperate and horrifying videos from Kabul on the night of Aug. and its allies were clearly taken by surprise. The Taliban’s military offensive was three months in the making, and culminated in a victory so swift the U.S. The Taliban pretty much formally won the war in Afghanistan on Sunday, August 15, when they swept into Kabul and took photos inside the abandoned Presidential Palace. The local ISIS affiliate claimed responsibility for that attack, which many coalition nations responded to by ending evacuation flights out of the country. is set to leave the country entirely on Aug. service members-in a suicide attack that hit outside the Kabul airport less than a week before the U.S. And it’s come to a fairly sad and bloody end with more than 100 people killed-including 13 U.S. This episode we speak about where Afghanistan might go from here-with help from former Afghan translator Habib Hassan and former State Department official Elizabeth Threlkeld, currently of the Stimson Center.Īfter nearly 20 years of fighting, America’s war in Afghanistan has ended.

Radio dept this past week ep rar file