The New Saigon III

 Everyone knew that contingecy plans and an orderly exit from Afghanistan was inevitable yet they screwed up royally.

Yes, this bungled humanitarian and political crisis serves to distract the globe from from trouble at home and the Chinese-spread virus very few are still paranoid about but nevertheless ... :

It’s a crisis because while Trudeau was posing for selfies with incoming planeloads of Syrian refugees in 2015, his government would go on to ignore six years of warnings about the increasing threat our Afghan allies faced.

 

How many of these interpreters are Justin?

Right ...

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Still, Trudeau fiddled. He knew the deadline for when American forces were going to leave as well as the Taliban did. He knew the Taliban were rapidly advancing and that government forces were crumbling. He knew that 158 men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces lost their lives in the fight against the Taliban, and that many more Afghans could face death simply for having helped us.

And yet, instead of spending the past weeks and months evacuating personnel, or at least putting a plan in place for getting our people out if the government fell and we had to close the Canadian Embassy on short notice, Trudeau appears to have been caught by surprise. So much so that our prime minister ended up cheerfully waving to supporters in front of his campaign bus on the same day as Afghanistan’s president was fleeing for his life. If nothing else, the optics were horrendous.

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Ten buses screamed out of France’s embassy in Kabul early this week, past every Taliban checkpoint along the way, and according to eyewitnesses, zipped confidently through a back-entrance gate and straight onto the chaotic tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Five hundred exhausted and terrified passengers were then loaded onto a French military aircraft which quickly took off. 

And then it happened again on Thursday, four buses this time, under the guard of French special forces. As with the first convoy, Paris newspapers reported the buses carried French nationals stranded in Kabul, and hundreds of Afghans and their families the French embassy had given shelter to since before the Taliban roared into and re-occupied the city. Two ballsy airlifts took them to safety at a French military base in the United Arab Emirates, where hundreds of desperate people were given a hot meal, questioned about their identities and had their documents confirmed. Most were then sent on to Paris, where they received physical and mental-health support as well as cash, clothing, and places to stay as they begin their new lives. ...

(Sidebar: that's right - the French. Not the Americans who were caught with their pants down. Thanks, Joe.) 

There were no buses, soldiers or escorts for these terrified people . Thursday they received a short text from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). They were instructed (in English only) to urgently head to the airport on their own, try to find a way through multiple Taliban checkpoints searching for them, and then if they survived that kilometres-long trip, figure out a way through thousands of desperate Afghans trying to flee. They were told by IRCC to carry documents to identify themselves to a gate agent, but because those same documents would be used to identify them by the Taliban, it was up to them to decide whether to carry them. With that, IRCC wiped its hands of responsibility. No direction on where to avoid Taliban checkpoints, no specific gates to head to (there are eight), and no Canadians on site to help. In fact there hadn’t been any Canadian officials in Kabul for a week, and when a few arrived hours after that text blast, reporters said they had travelled on an American military flight because their Canadian C-17 needed servicing somewhere else. 

Needless to say, no one got through the airport, so they returned to their safe houses — wondering if their last flight to freedom had left without them. 

It hadn’t. It never existed. Later that night another set of blasts went out again telling Afghans to move on their own to the airport. This time they were told to shout “Canada”  and hope a soldier would hear them and help them through the airport gates. Taliban guards could hear them as well there, which would ensure that the target on their backs they had been trying to hide came completely into focus.

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The failure of the bribed press:

If you want to understand the depth of the collapse of Canadian media capacity wrought by decades of business failures, it is unfolding right before you. We're half-blind on a global story because nobody had the resources or the ability to station a single body in Afghanistan.

 

The bribed press seems to be deaf to Justin's many screw-ups.