Clarissa Ward of CNN Looks Back on the Afghanistan War

“I’m sitting here for 12 hours in the airport, eight hours on the airfield and I haven’t seen a single U.S. plane take off,” she said on the air that day. “How on earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.”

Days later, President Biden said the United States had helped evacuate more than 70,000 people from Aug. 14 to Aug. 24. The New York Times reported last week that more than 123,000 people had been airlifted out of the country since July.

Ms. Ward defended the Aug. 20 dispatch, saying it should be interpreted in the context of “live, in-the-moment reporting.”

“We had been at the airport since 7 a.m. local,” she said. “From 7 to 10 a.m., we saw three U.S. planes take off with evacuees, but then they abruptly stopped for approximately 10 hours.” At the time, she added, she didn’t see how the United States could complete the evacuation in the time it had set for itself.

CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, praised her reporting, citing not only her Afghanistan coverage, but her dispatches this year on the poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a military coup in Myanmar and the impact of the pandemic on India.

“I’d be hard pressed to say Clarissa wasn’t the most important hire I’ve made,” he said. “She’s willing to go where most others won’t go.”

Ms. Ward left Kabul on Aug. 20, along with her crew and Afghans who had worked for CNN, on a flight to Qatar. Prevented from going straight to her London home because of pandemic restrictions, she was reunited in France with her children and husband, Philipp von Bernstorff, a German count and businessman whom she met at a Moscow dinner party in 2007.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/06/business/media/clarissa-ward-cnn-afghanistan.html