The Morning Dispatch: Evacuation Deadline Approaching

Happy Wednesday! We’re well aware that this newsletter has been filled with some pretty grim news of late, so let’s start today off with a palate cleanser: CORGI RACING.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that U.S. and coalition forces had combined to evacuate just under 22,000 people from Afghanistan over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of evacuations since August 14 to over 70,000. President Joe Biden rebuffed calls from lawmakers and allies to extend his administration’s self-imposed withdrawal deadline beyond August 31—which the Taliban now views as a “red line”—saying the U.S. is “currently on pace” to achieve its objectives by then. He did, however, say he asked the Pentagon and State Department to prepare contingency plans in case the timeline needs to be adjusted.

• A Taliban spokesman said yesterday that the group will continue to permit foreign nationals to access Hamid Karzai International Airport until the aforementioned August 31 deadline, but that they are “not allowing the evacuation of Afghans anymore.” The White House, however, said it continues to be the Biden administration’s “expectation” that Special Immigrant Visa applicants “should be able to get to the airport.”

• The World Bank announced on Tuesday it is freezing its aid to Afghanistan “in line with [its] internal policies and procedures,” which dictate that it cannot disburse funds when there is disagreement among member countries over the legitimacy of a given government.

• The House voted along party lines on Tuesday to advance a procedural motion instructing committees to begin drafting Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package. The final vote was delayed several hours by Democratic moderates, who had pledged not to support the move until Speaker Nancy Pelosi committed to hold a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package. 

• The House also voted along party lines Tuesday to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore certain provisions of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court and require states to receive federal “preclearance” before changing their election laws. The bill will likely not advance past the Senate.

• The Washington Post reported Tuesday night that President Biden received a report from the intelligence community that failed to reach a definitive conclusion regarding the origins of the coronavirus. Portions of the report will likely be declassified in the coming days.

• The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to stay a lower court order requiring the Biden administration to continue enforcing the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP)—also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy—while the appeals process continues. MPP requires many asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants to await the outcome of their cases outside the United States. The court’s three liberal justices indicated they would have granted the Biden administration’s application for a stay.

• A new CDC study looking at 43,000 infections in Los Angeles County found that, in late July, the COVID-19 hospitalization rate among unvaccinated people was more than 29 times that of fully vaccinated people. The report also determined infection rates to be about five times higher among the unvaccinated, but noted that the vaccines’ overall efficacy against infection diminished over time and amid the spread of the Delta variant.

• The National Institutes of Health’s director, Francis Collins, predicted Tuesday that the FDA will likely not authorize COVID-19 vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 until the end of 2021.

• Former University of Georgia running back and Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker filed paperwork to run against Sen. Raphael Warnock in 2022. Walker, a Republican, enters the multi-candidate GOP field with the backing of former President Donald Trump.

Biden Recommits to August 31 Withdrawal Deadline

President Biden had a decision to make on Tuesday: Would he extend his administration’s self-imposed August 31 Afghanistan withdrawal deadline to ensure every last American and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holder could be evacuated?

Congressional Republicans—including Sen. Ben Sasse, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and Sen. Rob Portman—argued he should.

Congressional Democrats—including Rep. Elise Slotkin, Rep. Jimmy Panetta, Rep. Tom Malinowski, Rep. Seth Moulton, and Rep. Adam Schiff—argued he should.

International allies—including UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian—argued he should.

But Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban spokesman, said an extension would “create mistrust” and result in “consequences.”

Biden rejected calls to extend the deadline after a virtual meeting with G7 leaders, explaining in a speech Tuesday evening that “the sooner we can finish, the better.” 

The White House’s case is a bit more complicated than that, but not much. Biden claims that U.S. forces are currently “on pace to finish” the evacuation by the end of the month—and that “each day of operations brings added risk to our troops.” Biden had on Monday dispatched CIA Director William Burns to Kabul for clandestine negotiations with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar—presumably regarding the August 31 cutoff point.

“Every day we’re on the ground is another day we know that ISIS-K is seeking to target the airport and attack both U.S. and Allied forces and innocent civilians,” Biden said in remarks yesterday, delivered after a five-hour delay. “Additionally, thus far, the Taliban have been taking steps to work with us so we can get our people out—but it’s a tenuous situation. We already had some gun fighting break out. We run a serious risk of it breaking down as time goes on.”

Biden added, however, that he’s tasked the Pentagon and State Department with drafting “contingency plans” if it becomes “necessary” to adjust the timeline. “The completion by August 31 depends upon the Taliban continuing to cooperate and allow access to the airport for those who we’re transporting out,” he said.

By all accounts, the pace of evacuation has accelerated in recent days after the administration sent thousands of troops back to Afghanistan. Major General Hank Taylor told reporters at a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday that 37 U.S. military aircraft had carried approximately 12,700 people to safety over the past 24 hours, and that, over the same time period, 57 coalition and partner aircraft left Kabul with about 8,900 more. 

“As of this afternoon,” Biden said yesterday, “we’ve helped evacuate 70,700 people just since August 14; 75,900 people since the end of July.”

The White House went into overdrive yesterday touting the accomplishment. “We are moving thousands of people, every day, out of Afghanistan and to safety in what is one of the biggest airlifts in world history,” a senior administration official told reporters on a background call. 

Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, spent much of Tuesday morning retweeting messages like “This big, successful, nimble military operation is not getting the credit it deserves,” “This now matches the Berlin airlift, widely regarded by historians as the greatest in history,” and “I feel like the initial coverage of BIDEN’S WORLD HISTORIC INCOMPENTENCE [sic] may have missed some of the nuance of what’s actually going on in Afghanistan.”

But it may be too early to spike the football. The Biden administration has been proactive updating reporters on how many people have been evacuated, but up-to-date information on the number of Americans and Afghan allies who remain in harm’s way is much harder to come by. Some U.S. officials believe thousands of Americans—and tens of thousands of evacuation-eligible Afghans—are still in the country, many far from Kabul’s airport.

“Many people have asked, reasonably, why we cannot provide a precise number of American citizens still in-country,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in a press briefing Monday. “When Americans have come to Afghanistan over the years, we asked them to register with the embassy. Many have left without deregistering; others never register at all. That is their right, of course. And it’s our responsibility to find them, which we are now doing hour by hour.” He said government officials have been trying to contact remaining Americans to deliver “specific instructions” about a “method to safely and efficiently transfer groups of American citizens onto the airfield.”

The U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan on Tuesday reportedly texted a “final message” to American citizens wanting to leave the country with assistance from the U.S. government, but recalled it 30 minutes later.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that everyone seeking—and eligible for—refuge will receive it by August 31, particularly because, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted yesterday, evacuations will need to wind down ahead of that date to ensure enough time to get troops, machinery, and weaponry out of the country. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed Tuesday that several hundred U.S. service members left Afghanistan as part of “prudent and efficient force management.”

A bipartisan pair of representatives—Democrat Seth Moulton and Republican Peter Meijer, both veterans of the Iraq War—recently conducted a secret and unauthorized oversight visit to HKIA to gather on-the-ground information, and late Tuesday night issued a statement arguing that Washington “should be ashamed of the position we put our servicemembers in.”  (Speaker Pelosi sent a letter to lawmakers last night saying such trips “unnecessarily divert needed resources from the priority mission of safely and expeditiously evacuating America [sic] and Afghans at risk from Afghanistan.”)

“We came into this visit wanting, like most veterans, to push the president to extend the August 31 deadline,” Moulton and Meijer wrote. “After talking with commanders on the ground and seeing the situation firsthand, it is obvious that because we started the evacuation so late, no matter what we do, we won’t get everyone out on time, even by September 11. Sadly and frustratingly, getting our people out depends on maintaining the current bizarre relationship with the Taliban.”

“We are very interested in making sure that access to the airport remains as fluid as possible,” Kirby said Monday. “There’s a lot of factors that go into making sure that access remains secure and that we can facilitate it … but you can imagine thus far and going forward it does require a constant coordination and deconfliction with the Taliban.”

“The road, which goes to the airport, is blocked,” Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid declared Tuesday. “Afghans cannot take that road to go to the airport, but foreign nationals are allowed to take that road to the airport.”

“We are not allowing the evacuation of Afghans anymore,” he added, arguing that Afghan doctors and academics ought to remain home. “They should not go to other countries, to those Western countries.”

Asked if those comments effectively ended the Biden administration’s effort to evacuate Special Immigrant Visa holders, Psaki argued “that is not how you should read it.” 

“Our expectation, which we have also conveyed to the Taliban, is that [SIV holders] should be able to get to the airport,” she said. “Individuals who are eligible for Special Immigrant Visas or others who we are helping facilitate their evacuation and their departure, we are … working to be in touch with them about how and when to come to the airport.”

From the Wall Street Journal: “On Tuesday night, the Taliban blocked roads to the airport, shooting in the air to disperse crowds, according to witnesses. An Afghan who worked for a Western organization and tried to reach the airport said he had been told by the Taliban fighters manning the checkpoint that they are under orders to only let through convoys organized by foreign embassies. Individuals, even if holding valid travel documents, were being turned away.”

House Dems Paper Over Spending Schism—For Now 

With everything going on in Afghanistan, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Congress is working to authorize about $4 trillion in spending—but Tuesday was a big day on that front. 

House Democrats voted yesterday to adopt a rule that will allow them to move forward on a $3.5 trillion budget framework, overcoming a day-long delay caused by a group of moderate Democrats that revolted against advancing the Biden administration’s sweeping budget proposal without first passing the bipartisan infrastructure deal that received Senate approval earlier this month. 

The measure passed entirely along partisan lines, 220-212, with both moderates and progressives within the Democratic caucus claiming they won the short-lived standoff.

Harvest and Ryan broke down how we got to this point—and what comes next—in yesterday’s Uphill.

The stand-off between moderate Democrats and House leadership started two weeks ago, when a group of nine centrist Democrats, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, sent a letter to Pelosi urging her to not delay the vote on the bipartisan infrastructure deal.

“We simply can’t afford months of unnecessary delays and risk squandering this once-in-a-century, bipartisan infrastructure package,” they said. “We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law.”

They doubled down right before the House came back in town, releasing a Washington Postop-ed on Sunday: “We are firmly opposed to holding the president’s infrastructure legislation hostage to reconciliation, risking its passage and the bipartisan support behind it.”

How did Democrats resolve the disagreement?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought to woo the centrists by promising a vote on the infrastructure package before current transportation programs expire in October. But it wasn’t until Tuesday that a specific date was promised as a concession for moderates: The House Rules Committee passed a nonbinding resolution calling for a vote on the infrastructure deal by September 27. Then, barely an hour later, the moderates decided they needed a stronger commitment, forcing the Rules Committee to meet again. This time, lawmakers negotiated a provision that made it directly into the rule itself saying the House will consider the bipartisan infrastructure bill no later than September 27.

Gottheimer et al. declared victory Tuesday afternoon. “We have established a path forward that ensures we can pass this once-in-a-century infrastructure investment by September 27, allowing us to create millions of jobs and bring our nation into the 21st century,” the congressman wrote. “It will receive standalone consideration, fully delinked, and on its own merits.”

But Democrats aren’t out of the woods yet. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus, reiterated in a statement yesterday that they view the two pieces of legislation as inextricably linked. “We will only vote for the infrastructure bill after passing the reconciliation bill,” she wrote. It’s unclear if the Caucus’s 90-plus members all share that view. 

At least one does. Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday called the September 27 deadline “nonbinding” and argued that, as far as she saw it, “the commitment on the strategy to move both [the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill] simultaneously still remains.” She added that she thinks moderates “lost leverage by doing this little fiasco.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Stephanie Murphy—an advocate of advancing infrastructure first—told reporters Tuesday she believes the House reached a “good result” and is now “able to move forward on the infrastructure bill delinked from the reconciliation bill.”

Asked if she was concerned progressives would pull their support from infrastructure over said delinking, Murphy simply said it “would be unfortunate if the progressives choose not to support Biden’s infrastructure agenda.”

Democrats clearly still have some issues to work out—and these disagreements are likely to flare up again in the coming weeks as committees begin drafting the $3.5 trillion package—but President Biden attempted to paper over the obvious tensions in remarks at the White House on Tuesday. 

“There were differences; strong points of view,” he said. “They’re always welcome. What is important is that we came together to advance our agenda, and I thank everyone who did that.”

Worth Your Time

• Even the most entrenched media critics on the right would likely concede that the “mainstream” press has been pretty tough on the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal. So much so, in fact, that Biden’s defenders have resorted to accusing the media of having a hawkish bias. But Ramesh Ponnuru argues in Bloomberg that it’s a lot simpler than that. “The news that’s being reported is just bad,” he writes. “Biden wouldn’t have had to send troops back to Afghanistan if it weren’t. When Republicans in Trump’s first weeks in office complained that the press was not letting him have a traditional presidential honeymoon, it rang hollow: When your national security adviser has to go after 23 days on the job, there’s no way to make it a positive story. There’s no way to make this story good either. Biden’s problem isn’t a biased press; it’s a recalcitrant reality.”

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• In yesterday’s French Press (🔒), David writes about what he sees as a paradox in our debates about free speech. “It’s clear that a large number of Americans are afraid to share their views, and for good reason. A recent Cato Institute survey found that 62 percent of Americans agree that ‘the political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive,’” he notes. “At the same time, however … a visitor from another planet would open Twitter or Facebook, look at American discourse and think, ‘If this is restraint, I’d hate to see freedom.’ The online world is awash not just in political opinion, but in extreme vitriol, vicious hatred, and extraordinarily profane and pornographic expression.”

Let Us Know

Has your confidence in the competence of the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal increased or decreased over the past week?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).