US Ready To Ignore Rest Of People Trapped In Afghanistan

The airlift has ended now that CNN, CBS, ABC, the New York Times, AP, NBC, and other outlets no longer feel compelled to inform their audiences in urgent terms of the reason for it.

Washington, September 2 – Several weeks after the ignominious and precipitous collapse of the US-backed Afghan military and takeover by the militant Islamist Taliban movement, leaving hundreds of thousands stranded at at the mercy of that violent, repressive organization, American officials have decided enough time has passed and efforts to evacuate any US citizens, or Afghan citizens who now face danger because they worked for the US, will cease, because media attention to the debacle has waned.

Senior administration officials acknowledged today that while an unknown number of American citizens remain unable to leave Afghanistan – either because the trip to the main airport in Kabul requires traversing Taliban-controlled streets, or because of other logistical hurdles – the urgency of the airlift operation to remove them from the country will come to an end now that CNN, CBS, ABC, the New York Times, AP, NBC, and other mainstream outlets no longer feel compelled to inform their audiences in urgent terms of the ongoing disaster.

“A cursory look at news coverage shows the story hasn’t cracked the front page for a while,” noted a White House staffer. “That means the editors of those publications and outlets don’t think the American public needs to pay such close attention to it anymore. We, in turn, take our cue from the media, the ultimate arbiters of what’s important to society. It follows that we can cancel the evacuation operation, because it has lost its valence among the people. It just doesn’t matter at this point.”

A different official explained how editors make that determination. “Developments that negatively affect Democratic officeholders and candidates have to occupy minimum time and space in the news cycle,” elaborated a member of the Press Secretary’s team. “That principle has guided editorial decisions for decades at this point. Even when negative coverage is unavoidable, there are ways to mitigate it, or to use neutral phraseology that would never appear if the subject were a Republican. Still, the preferred narrative has Democrats as noble public servants overcome by circumstances beyond human control, or perhaps by the perfidy of Republicans, and that cannot hold when catastrophe occurs under the Democratic Party aegis. Voters might forgive some incompetence, but not if we keep shoving it in their faces.”

American citizens in hiding in Afghanistan voiced support for the decision. “It’s really our own fault,” one conceded. “We were stupid enough to think that citizenship means the country will do everything to protect us, especially since we came here as part of an official foreign policy.”

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