by Ed Morrissey at HotAir
So much for “they should have left earlier,” eh? A Pentagon memo acquired by NBC News shows the military scrambling to get “immediate family members” of troops out of Afghanistan after Joe Biden abandoned them in his rush to retreat. Those number in the “dozens,” NBC reports, but the number of extended family members of US troops go higher than that:
The Pentagon is stepping up efforts to get family members of U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, creating a database of the dozens who are trapped there.
On Thursday, more than two months after the U.S. military withdrew completely from Afghanistan, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl issued a memo asking any U.S. military personnel and DOD civilians with immediate family members who need help leaving Afghanistan to email his office.
The memo, obtained by NBC News, instructs service members and Defense Department civilians to email a specific address with the subject “immediate family member.” In addition to names, the emails will need to include passport, contact and other personal information about the family members so they can be added to the database.
There are still several dozen immediate family members of U.S. service members in Afghanistan, according to defense officials. Those include children, sisters and brothers, and parents. There are well over 100 extended family members still in Afghanistan, but it’s not clear how many of them want to leave the country, the officials said.
The Daily Wire’s Hank Berrien notes that there had been hints of this issue in the past. In late September, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) wrote a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken asking about the status of troops’ family members. McCaul warned at the time that “if we abandon the family members of our service men and women in Afghanistan, they will certainly be slaughtered by the Taliban,” and told Blinken that their families had contacted him about the issue:…
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