U.S. troops return to Afghanistan to aid in evacuation
Taliban continue rapid advance across country
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Pentagon is moving 3,000 Marines and soldiers to Afghanistan and another 4,000 troops to the region to evacuate most of the U.S. Embassy and American citizens in Kabul, as the Biden administration braces for a possible collapse of the Afghan government within the next month, administration and military officials said.
The sharply deteriorating situation in the country, as the Taliban rapidly advance across the north and Afghan security forces battle to defend ever shrinking territory in the south and west, has forced the Biden administration to accelerate plans to get Americans out.
President Joe Biden, after meeting
with his top national security advisers Wednesday night and again Thursday morning, also ordered additional expedited flights out of the country for Afghans who have worked with the United States, so that their applications for special immigrant visas could be evaluated.
The embassy sent the latest in a series of alarming alerts, urging Americans to “leave Afghanistan immediately using available commercial flight options.”
And in Washington, State Department spokesperson Ned Price announced what he described as a drawdown of an unspecified number of civilians among the roughly 4,000 embassy personnel — including about 1,400 American citizens — to begin immediately.
“As we’ve said all along, the increased tempo of the Taliban military engagements and the resulting increase in violence and instability across Afghanistan is of grave concern,” he said. “We’ve been evaluating the security situation every day to determine how best to keep those serving at our embassy safe.”
But, Price added, “Let me be very clear about this: The embassy remains open.”
American negotiators are also trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the U.S. Embassy in Kabul if they take over the country’s government and ever want to receive foreign aid, three U.S. officials said.
The 30-day estimate is one scenario, and administration and military officials insist that the fall of Kabul might still be prevented if the Afghan security forces can muster the resolve to put up more resistance. But while Afghan commandos have managed to continue fighting in some areas, they have largely folded in a number of northern provincial capitals.
The Taliban seized the strategic city of Ghazni, about 90 miles south of Kabul, on Thursday, putting the group in a better position to attack Kabul after its recent string of victories in the north.
By the end of the day, the Taliban were also on the verge of taking Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city, and Herat, in western Afghanistan near the Iranian border. Kandahar is historically and strategically important. The Taliban, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, began their insurgency there in the 1990s.
A senior official in the Biden administration said in an interview that the Taliban might soon take Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province and the country’s economic engine, which is now effectively surrounded by the Taliban. The fall of Mazar-iSharif and Kandahar, the official said, could lead to a surrender of the Afghan government by September.
Another senior U.S. official described the mood in the White House as a combination of alarm and resignation — at the rapid pace of the Taliban offensive and the collapse of Afghan national forces, and over how the situation could continue to worsen. There has been a constant stream of videoconference calls every day this week, the official said.
U.S. officials conceded that they greatly overestimated the ability of the Afghan national forces to hold off the Taliban for at least a year or so. The collapse, they said, was almost instantaneous. But they argued that Biden accurately assessed the ultimate outcome: that if Americans stayed, they would get caught in the crossfire of yet another Afghan civil war.
Pentagon press secretary John F. Kirby said two Marine infantry battalions and one Army battalion, some 3,000 troops altogether, would deploy in the next two days to Hamid Karzai International Airport to help evacuate Americans and embassy personnel. The troops are coming from areas in the Middle East, the Central Command area of responsibility, Kirby said.
An additional 1,000 Army personnel will head to Qatar, the Pentagon said, to help process the visa applications of Afghan who worked with the U.S. military during the war and who could be targeted by surging Taliban forces.
And as a contingency plan in case any embassy evacuation turns into a fight with the Taliban, the Pentagon is moving an entire infantry brigade combat team — some 3,500 troops — from Fort Bragg, N.C., to Kuwait in the next week, so that they can quickly deploy if necessary.
If those troops end up in Afghanistan, that would bring the number of U.S. forces there to around 7,000, more than double the number in the country when Biden announced in April that he would withdraw U.S. troops and end America’s longest war.
The deployment is “a very narrowly focused mission of safeguarding the orderly reduction of civilian personnel out of Afghanistan,” Kirby said.