As U.S. Embassy's sole consular officer in #SouthSudan 2013-2014, I've been at the airport running #evacuations out of a country at war. Risk & scale differed from #Afghanistan, but some challenges on the ground were similar. A thread to share things I learned on the ground. 1/17
There is no graceful way to evac vulnerable people from a country at war. There are better ways & worse ways, but none look good from the outside (or inside). Things could have gone much better, but they also could have gone worse, and many challenges were inevitable. 2/17
The hardest part of evac'ing from a warzone is reaching the exit – airport in this case. USG didn’t control Kabul so it had few options to help and all put our people at risk. In South Sudan, we had some success moving a few people to the airport from inside Juba... 3/17
...but opportunities were ltd. Even harder beyond the capital. We aborted an attempted evac from another town when our aircraft came under fire with serious injuries to US service members. Deciding when and how much to put our people at risk is hard. 4/17
Next, someone must decide who gets in. These are life and death decisions, made 100s-1000s of times a day. Mil and civ officers do so with vague guidelines from Washington. Who counts as a family member? How do you prove they are? 5/17
How do you prioritize among hundreds when no one’s documents are complete? Many don’t grab their passport and other docs when fleeing for their lives on short notice. 6/17
Answers are subjective. Doing it at volume is hard, making decisions among 1000s or more. USG could have taken steps earlier to reduce some numbers (see below), but none of that applied once evac began. It was always going to be a crush. Why? 7/17
Americans and our allies aren't the only ones trying to leave, and our departures aren't other people's priorities. 8/17
Most at the gates probably weren’t USG priorities (Americans, Afghan allies) but USG had no way to control/limit crowding without law enforcement authority. Expanding the perimeter would have just pushed the same problem out further. 9/17
If more Americans and allies had left sooner, we would have had fewer to evac. USG had control over one but not the other. 10/17
Not much USG could do to get more Americans out sooner b/c many chose not to go. USG has warned Americans for yrs not to travel to Afghanistan and specifically urged Americans to leave since 2020 deal was signed. Thousands stayed b/c they’re usually there for a reason. 11/17
For family, business, humanitarian or other conflict-related work. Some work in security. Most want to be on last safe flight out possible. All had good reasons, but you don't know when the last one will be, it won’t likely be safe, and only has so many seats. 12/17
I saw it in South Sudan, urging people to leave as soon as they had a chance, but many opted to delay, hoping things wouldn't get worse. But they did. 13/17
Where we could and should have done better is Afghan allies. But this required fixing a broken special immigrant visa (SIV) program years ago–not just starting evacs a few weeks earlier. #Trump admin intentionally clogged the system... 14/17
But it was already a 14-step process with unnecessary, difficult bureaucratic steps, particularly hard to complete from Afghanistan. Had Congress, Defense, and State fixed it years ago, 10,000s of our #AfghanAllies would be in the US already. 15/17
As many criticize the evac process, surely plagued by inefficiencies and interagency contradictions, remember the mil and civ on the ground charged with 1000s of these life and death decisions, in dangerous circumstances, doing the best they could with limited information. 16/17
They deserve immense gratitude but will live with the weight of these choices forever, and what their decisions meant for the ones they didn’t choose. I wish them peace of mind, to be proud of the work they did, know they did their best, and that their service saved lives. 17/17
If you want to learn more about what a wartime #evacuation looks like, please check out my book #thedissentchannel which gives a detailed account of ours in South Sudan @publicaffairs publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/elizabe…
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