At Last, Some Meaningful Statistics Out of Afghanistan

Something has been badly off about the figures coming out of Afghanistan.  I have heard the Biden Administration give a figure of about 20,000 Afghans who have worked with us, and 70,000 counting family members.  Other estimates have run as high as 300,000.  And while there has been happy talk about nearly 120,000 people evacuated from the airport, somehow the government has never told us how many are Afghans versus allies evacuating their own nationals.

This article finally has some sort of meaningful estimates.  It gives figures of 31,000 people evacuated by the US from August 17 to August 31, including about 23,000 Afghans. The others evacuees were presumably other countries removing their own people.  On the other hand, the article also reported General Mark Milley as saying 20,000 Afghans had been brought to the US and another 40,000 at bases in other countries.  It is not clear if these figures are contradictory or if some are Afghans evacuated by other countries.  The article also gives the figure of 120,000 people evacuated, meaning only about half of them were Afghans.

The article gives a figures of 18,000 to 20,000 Afghans who worked for the US and applied for Special Immigrant Visas (SIV's).  Counting family members there were about 70,000 in the SIV pool.  It estimates another 50,000 who were eligible for the program because of their work with the US government but did not apply or were turned down.  Finally, it gave the number of 265,000 Afghans "and their families" "may have had some form of eligibility to apply for a U.S. visa because of their work with U.S. governmental and nongovernmental organizations during the past two decades."  

It is not clear from the article whether that refers to a total of 265,000 people, or whether family members are in addition to the 265,000.  If the family members are in addition to the 265,000, and we assume about 3.5 family members for each applicant (based on 20,000 SIV holders yielding 70,000 family members), the total would come to about 927,500 people eligible for visas!  Not only is this an impossible number to airlift out, it comes to approximately 2.8 percent of the total population.  If we were truly dealing with that number, I have more sympathy for the Administration, faced with a truly impossible task.  

If the total was 265,000 -- well, it would have taken at least of month of airlifts all at peak efficiency, to say nothing of the logistical burden of providing for so many, but maybe.  If we were dealing with 70,000 SIV holders, that was clearly possible to go, given that we evacuated nearly that many.  Another 50,000 potential SIV holder should be possible with better planning.  

There is still a large element of the fog of war here.  I await more reliable information about who we got out and who we left.