THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
August 31, 2021 at 18:08 JST
Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi arrives at the prime minister’s office in Tokyo on Aug. 31. (Koichi Ueda)
With Air Self-Defense Force troops and transport planes stuck on the ground in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi is pondering his next moves on the crisis in Afghanistan triggered by the Taliban takeover.
“We will consider the next step as we examine the situation there,” Kishi said at an Aug. 31 news conference after a Cabinet meeting.
The United States has already completed its evacuation operations at Kabul airport, adding to the pressure on the Japanese government to decide what to do next.
Referring to hundreds of local Afghans who worked for the Japanese Embassy and the Japan International Cooperation Agency and are still stuck in Afghanistan, Kishi pledged that the government “will do its utmost to help them flee.”
Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato also vowed that Japan will continue to do its best to provide the appropriate support to safely evacuate those still stranded in Afghanistan by “working with the United States and other nations.”
“We are now considering what to do with the ASDF plane operation and other concrete responses,” he also added.
The government dispatched three ASDF transport planes for the operation to evacuate Japanese nationals and around 500 local Afghan staff.
Despite multiple flights between Islamabad and Kabul, only one Japanese and 14 Afghan officials of the ousted government had been airlifted to safety as of Aug. 27.
Authorities blamed the sharply deteriorating security situation around Kabul airport as the reason.
Kabul terrorist attack may lead SDF to suspend rescue airlifts
August 27, 2021
ASDF evacuate just one Japanese from Kabul
August 28, 2021
SDF planes to rescue remaining Japanese, local staff from Kabul
August 23, 2021
EDITORIAL: Japan’s heavy moral responsibility to get needy out of Afghanistan
August 25, 2021
U.S. troops surge evacuations out of Kabul but threats persist
August 24, 2021
EDITORIAL: Failed Afghan airlift requires a rigorous postmortem
August 31, 2021
Here is a collection of first-hand accounts by “hibakusha” atomic bomb survivors.
A peek through the music industry’s curtain at the producers who harnessed social media to help their idols go global.
Cooking experts, chefs and others involved in the field of food introduce their special recipes intertwined with their paths in life.
A series based on diplomatic documents declassified by Japan’s Foreign Ministry
A series about Japanese-Americans and their memories of World War II
