Crossposted from the Taliban thread, because I think this is about to be a real clusterfuck.
I've been keeping an eye on reported evacuation flights. Flights aren't coming out of there without being noticed when they leave Afghan airspace and turn the transponders back on.
It doesn't appear that any planes since the initial 640-person C-17 have been loaded beyond their traditional "full" complement of humans, even though most of these planes are designed to carry large metal objects and could easily carry 2-4x their normal seated capacity if preserving human life were the principal objective of the current mission.
Instead, all evidence points to flights being underloaded, with just a few people on planes that can hold many more. Australia sent a 90-man plane to pick up 26 people.
Even if everything was loaded as much as possible, I don't see that there's any way the current air traffic numbers could suggest an evacuation of more than 1000 people today.
My prediction for the total number of evacuees for the previous 24 hours, by the time of the next daily briefing, is 650-900. We'll see.
Every plane that goes up with 20, 40, 50 people represents dozens of lives of women and children which could have been saved but will instead probably end on the streets of Kabul. It's becoming very evident that something else is motivating the transfers of the very specific people being transferred, and that most citizens of the United States are simply not a priority.