Excerpts of an email from the State Department to members of congress viewed by CBS News acknowledged that charter flights are still on the ground at the Mazar-i-Sharif airstrip in northern Afghanistan and have permission to land in Doha "if and when the Taliban agrees to takeoff."
Such is the situation as of Sunday. On Wednesday, however, I was on a call with a member of the air evacuation efforts and the head of a small airline not in the Middle East, brokering a way to transfer people into normal airlines following their successful flight out. Everything was in place except the money, and donors had been found -- just not quite enough as at that moment.
I infer that someone within the Biden Administration or the State Department (whom the effort had been briefing, as we would need institutional support to finalize visas in some cases) decided to try to find their own way out, and decided Qatar was the obvious choice. Telling Doha about this is equivalent to having informed the Taliban of it, because Qatar hosted them in their exile, brokered the peace talks, and is one of their chief supporters. Qatar told the Taliban, and the Taliban now have these people as hostages.
The Biden Administration is trying to convince the press that the Taliban are the bad guys here, and they certainly are among the bad guys: they're now holding Americans hostage. But the Biden administration also has a lot of blame to carry because they gave the game away. Instead of working with veteran operators they blew things up by trying to take over and run things with their regular incompetence.
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