A lack of flights and the search for a new US reception center are among the hurdles facing the White House as it races to speed up the evacuation of at-risk Afghans from their homeland, a senior US official and others familiar with the new plan said.
Other obstacles include difficulties in obtaining passports and an affordable housing shortage in the US, they said.
The plan’s goal “is just to make this more enduring and less of an emergency operation,” the senior US official said in describing the revamp, requesting anonymity to discuss internal operations.
Photo: Reuters
The administration of US President Joe Biden has been under pressure to speed up Operation Allies Welcome from lawmakers, veterans groups and others angry that tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the US government and others at risk of Taliban retaliation were left behind when the last US troops departed in August last year after 20 years of war.
Human rights organizations and the UN say the Taliban has stepped up detentions, abductions and killings.
Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs spokesman Qari Sayed Khosti has rejected the accusation of reprisal killings, saying that no evidence had been presented.
“People left behind are getting more and more desperate, and we’re going to start seeing more of the consequences of that, whether mass movement of refugees or meeting grim fates in Afghanistan,” said a second senior US official.
Advocacy groups say that Washington should ensure the new plan will not suffer the types of setbacks that have hampered Afghan arrivals.
“We want to see enough resources applied to these issues so that even if one area fails or falters for a moment, there are options to make sure the pipeline isn’t cut off,” said Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and president of #AfghanEvac, a coalition of advocacy groups.
Biden on Tuesday ordered that up to US$1.2 billion be made available for the effort, the largest operation of its kind since the Vietnam War era. About 80,000 Afghans have been resettled since August.
The new plan calls for shifting the processing of Afghan evacuees for admission to the US from reception centers on US military bases that are being closed to a base in the Qatari capital of Doha.
Two US-chartered Qatar Airways flights per week from Kabul to Qatar’s al-Udeid Air Base are needed, with the goal of adding more flights, the US official said.
The flights are the “main challenge,” the official said.
Differences between Qatar and the Taliban triggered a suspension of regular charters before Christmas.
“We’re hoping we can get to regular order,” the US official said.
The Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the gulf state’s embassy in the US did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Qatar has told Washington that it intends to close the reception center in September ahead of the World Cup, the US official said, adding that the US was looking for alternatives, including reopening the air base center after the tournament.
Once Afghan evacuees are processed for admission, they would be flown to the US and placed with relatives or friends, provided housing by resettlement agencies or sent to a planned reception center to help them resettle.
The Biden administration has housed tens of thousands of such evacuees on bases in the US while their admission and resettlement arrangements were finalized.
The Pentagon has been closing those reception centers, with the last two expected to shutter this month, a US Department of Homeland Security official said, after the about 6,500 people there have been processed.
One of those two centers would remain open until the administration finds a civilian site, but a location has not been selected yet, the senior US official and a congressional source said.
The US Department of State plans to process Afghans for refugee status within 30 days beginning next month, two US officials said.
That is far faster than typical refugee processing, which can take years.
To be sure, that creates additional challenges that the second senior US official said would be difficult to surmount.
Speeding up the operation would require an agreement with the Taliban to prioritize passports for evacuees or a deal with Qatar to allow travel without them, more US officials in Doha to process evacuees and a “higher tolerance of risk to speed up vetting,” the second senior official said.
Afghans entering the US through the refugee resettlement program would be able to proceed directly to their destinations on UN-funded flights.
The department would also complete the processing in Doha of tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the US government and have applied for special immigration visas, the official and two congressional aides said.
The goal is to process and fly to the US 1,000 refugees and 1,000 recipients of special visas per month, the official said.
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