WHEN THE evacuation of Saigon began in March 1975, fixed-wing flights were quickly abandoned. Keeping runways open under artillery fire was too difficult. Instead, the American army used helicopters to bring people from all over the South Vietnamese capital to aircraft-carriers in the South China Sea. In landlocked Kabul, the American government does not have that option as it tries to evacuate its own citizens and Afghans who have worked for the United States. And so the scenes beamed all over the world from the city’s airport on August 15th and 16th were not of choppers carrying people to safety, but of an Apache attack helicopter hovering low over the runway to chase off a crowd of desperate Afghans so that planes could take off. The image that people will remember will be that of an air force transport plane taking off with desperate Afghans clinging to its undercarriage, from which they fell to their deaths.
The chaos was predictable. For weeks, flights out of Kabul had been packed with foreigners and those Afghans lucky enough to have passports, visas and money. When the city fell to the Taliban, less than 24 hours after President Ashraf Ghani visited the edge of the capital to inspect its defences, it was inevitable that people would try to flee. The airport is now the only part of Kabul not held by the militants. Instead, it is defended by several thousand American and other foreign troops, many flown in specifically for the evacuation. The Americans have taken over air-traffic control, and their Boeing C-17 transport planes have been leaving packed tightly with refugees. One was reported by Defence One, a website, to have landed in Qatar with 640 passengers, a near record. In one case, the dead body of an Afghan was found in the landing gear of a C-17. A picture showed families crammed into every available space of the cargo bay.
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