UPDATE: Biden has begun withdrawing more U.S. troops from Afghanistan. It’s a signal that there will be no broader attempt to secure the lives and safety of Americans beyond the airport.

This is a question that the media have repeatedly asked Biden administration appointees and spokesmen without getting an answer.

And there’s a good reason for that.

Biden’s people, as usual, don’t have a clue how many Americans are actually in Afghanistan. They actually don’t know anything which is why you have members of Congress posting appeals from constituents stranded in Afghanistan on social media.

 The State Department doesn’t know exactly how many Americans are left on the ground, although some have estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 were there when the evacuations began, several U.S. officials said.

Biden’s people have learned to meet press skepticism with a barrage of statistics. We evacuated 50,000 people in the last 2 seconds. 2 billion people have been evacuated in the last 4 days.

Are these statistics real? Anything coming out of the Biden administration and the dysfunctional diplomatic-military complex that’s running this mess isn’t to be trusted. Everyone is trying to pass the buck and no one was clearly ready for anything. Especially Biden.

But the statistics are particularly meaningless because we have no idea how many Americans are stranded in Afghanistan.

The State Department’s whole evacuation plan depends on people being able to remotely check in. If they can’t? Good luck.

The actual numbers are borderline meaningless.

Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Monday that the number of Americans on the ground is hard to assess because many Americans didn’t register with the embassy when they arrived in Afghanistan, and many didn’t deregister when they left.

And the Biden administration, it goes without saying, didn’t bother trying to track Americans going in and out of Afghanistan, even as the Taliban continued to make gains, because what were the odds that such information was ever going to matter?

Are we going to strand some Americans in Afghanistan? Beyond the US hostage that the Taliban’s Haqqani Network is already holding?

Probably.

The Biden administration has outsourced the details of the evacuation to the affected Americans and the Taliban, with the military and State Department playing second fiddle. That’s not a formula for getting everyone out.

“Unless we execute within a day or two, it’s not going to end well,” the U.S. official said, adding that the Taliban are currently screening documents on behalf of the U.S. outside the Kabul airport

On behalf of the U.S.

Meanwhile stories like these abound.

Rep. Carol Miller of West Virginia on Saturday posted a recording of the call to Twitter. In the recording, a woman’s voice is heard, wavering and breaking up at times over her own tears.

“Hour by hour, it’s getting more difficult,” she said.

“Even when the cars pass by I feel like they’re gonna stop by that door out there, the Taliban, and they’re gonna come and they’re gonna kill us,” she continued, crying in between words.

“I’m really scared,” she said, pleading for help before the audio trails off.

Miller said in her tweet that the woman was “attacked each time she tried to reach the airport.” Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment asking for more information about the attacks.

And more.

An American mother trapped in Afghanistan made an emotional plea to Joe Biden on Tuesday, urging the president to help her get back to her children in the United States as the Taliban becomes increasingly violent.

“We are in danger. We are in danger Mr. President, please help us,” the woman said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends First.”

The woman said that she had made multiple attempts to reach the Kabul airport, but people were quickly beaten, whipped, and turned away in fear for their lives.

This isn’t any way to run an evacuation. But the Biden administration is radical, incompetent and many of its key people, like Jake Sullivan, are inexperienced.

That’s a formula for the kind of disaster we’re seeing unfold.

Can we get all American citizens out of Afghanistan under these circumstances?