Evacuation on pace
U.S. says it can get last 300 Americans out of Afghanistan by deadline.
The United States is unlikely to keep diplomats in Afghanistan after the U.S. military departs Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday, ending a 20-year mission of one of the largest U.S. embassies in the world.
Officials said it was expected that the U.S. mission to Afghanistan would open a diplomatic mission in a country elsewhere in the region, in part to continue helping the surge of expected refugees obtain necessary departure documents.
That effort could be based in Pakistan or the United Arab Emirates, an official said, given the large Afghan diaspora in both countries.
U.S. diplomats have also for years held peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar, where there is a large U.S. military base that is being used now as a way station for tens of thousands of Afghans who have been evacuated.
After saying last week that the Biden administration was reviewing options for the future of the embassy in Kabul, Blinken told NBC’S “Meet the Press” on Sunday that “in terms of having an on-the-ground diplomatic presence on Sept. 1, that’s not likely to happen.”
“But what is going to happen is that our commitment to continue to help people leave Afghanistan who want to leave and who are not out by Sept. 1, that endures,” Blinken said. “There’s no deadline on that effort.”
The Taliban had wanted the United States and other foreign diplomats to remain in Kabul as acknowledgment of the Taliban’s legitimacy as Afghanistan’s rulers. Ending the U.S. diplomatic presence in the country will be a blow to the U.S. diplomatic corps, officials said.
Hundreds of American diplomats served in Afghanistan after the embassy was reclaimed by Marines in December 2001 during the U.s.-led invasion. The embassy had been closed since 1989, when the Soviet military withdrew from Afghanistan after a 10-year war.
Just weeks before the embassy closed Aug. 14, as the Taliban took over the capital, its staff stood at about 4,000 employees, around 1,400 of whom were U.S. diplomats, contractors and officials from other U.S. agencies.