Contingency plans - evac of personnel from Kabul and Baghdad [View All]

[TomInTib]

I found this from Steve Clemons over at HuffPo
And I know they have to plan for everything, but the tone of this is disturbing.

from article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-clemons/foreign-service-pessimism_b_58949.html

But I just got an intriguing anonymous tip -- not double sourced -- but from a source I have confidence in.

Apparently, the State Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has commissioned some real heavyweights in the foreign service -- several high-ranking former ambassadors and others -- to participate in a large scale exercise on how non-combatant American personnnel would be evacuated from Kabul and Baghdad where America's largest embassy operations are now based. These are called NEO plans, or non-combatant evacuation operations.

Perhaps they have been watching the Department of Defense squirm in response to Hillary Clinton's question about planning for military withdrawal and are getting the State Department ready for her next letter on the subject. Or perhaps the State Department has reasons to worry given on the ground realities that we might not know about.

According to someone close to this effort, the evacuations from Liberia and Saigon are on peoples' minds, not the more rosy outlook offered by O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack.

This effort has been coordinated with CENTCOM and the 5th Fleet, in part because the latter would deploy anti-terror Marine teams to secure escape perimeters.

The word is that the "tone" of the diplomats was "not good" and "quite pessimistic about conditions." My source said that "there is a high level of concern."

According to another source, Al Jazeera posed a question to State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher about this NEO effort, and his response was "I'm not gonna comment on that."

Perhaps Dick Cheney will quote this Huffington Post item now in his next reference of contending outlooks on America's mess in Iraq.