BLINKEN Threatens TALIBAN! Taliban must allow departures from Afghanistan, Blinken says.

He specifically urged the Taliban to allow the departure of charter flights seeking to evacuate American citizens and vulnerable Afghans from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. According to reports, hundreds of people have been waiting for clearance to leave the airport there for several days.
Scott Cooper, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a US military veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said getting people who want to leave out of Afghanistan is likely to be the most challenging of the administration’s three objectives.

“The thing that strikes me is how limited these objectives are,” Cooper told Al Jazeera. “If you were to look at any of the statements of Secretary Blinken’s predecessors or to those that were engaged in Afghanistan, this is far different than anything that we were talking about from late 2001 onward.”