Marines on guard in Kabul
U.S. stepping up evacuations in face of Taliban’s mad dash
WASHINGTON — The first forces of a Marine battalion arrived Friday in Kabul to stand guard as the U.S. speeds up evacuation flights for some American diplomats and thousands of Afghans, spurred by a lightning Taliban offensive that increasingly is isolating Afghanistan’s capital.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said “elements” of a battalion were now in Kabul, the vanguard of three Marine and Army battalions that the U.S. was sending to the city by the end of the weekend to help more Americans and their Afghan colleagues get out quickly.
The Taliban, emboldened by the imminent end of the U.S. combat mission in the country, took four more provincial capitals Friday, heightening fears they would move soon on the capital, which is home to millions of Afghans. “Clearly from their actions, it appears as if they are trying to get Kabul isolated,” Kirby noted at a Pentagon briefing.
The Pentagon also was moving an additional 4,500 to 5,000 troops to bases in the Persian Gulf countries of Qatar and Kuwait, including 1,000 to Qatar to speed up visa processing for Afghan translators and others who fear retribution from the Tal
iban for their past work with Americans, and their family members.
The remainder — 3,500 to 4,000 troops from a combat brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division — were bound for Kuwait. Kirby said the combat troops would be a reserve force on standby “in case we need even more” than the 3,000 going to Kabul.
President Joe Biden has remained adamant about ending the U.S. mission on Aug. 31, insisting the American and NATO mission that started on Oct. 7, 2001, has done what it could to build up a Kabul-based Afghan government and military that could withstand the Taliban when Western troops finally withdrew.
Friday’s latest significant blow was the Taliban capture of the capital of Helmand province, where American, British and other allied NATO forces fought some of the bloodiest battles in the past 20 years. Hundreds of Western troops died there during the course of the war, in fighting that often succeeded in knocking back Taliban fighters locally, only to have the Taliban move back in when a Western unit rotated out.
The State Department said the embassy in Kabul will remain partially staffed and functioning, but Thursday’s decision to evacuate a significant number of embassy employees and move in the thousands of additional U.S. troops is a sign of waning confidence in the Afghan government’s ability to hold off the Taliban surge. The Biden administration has not ruled out a full embassy evacuation.
The U.S. already had withdrawn most of its troops, but had kept about 650 troops in Afghanistan to support U.S. diplomatic security, including at the airport.
The Biden administration warned Taliban officials directly that the U.S. would respond if the Taliban attacked Americans during the stepped-up deployments and evacuations.
A BASE FOR AFGHANS
Americans are preparing a military base abroad to receive and house large numbers of those Afghan translators and others as their visa applications are processed. The Biden administration has not identified the base, but earlier was talking with both Kuwait and Qatar about using U.S. bases there for the temporary relocations.
As of Thursday, the U.S. had flown 1,200 Afghans — former American employees and their families whose visas are farthest along in the approval process — to Fort Lee, Va.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said the U.S. soon will have evacuation planes flying out daily for the Afghans who manage to reach the Kabul airport despite the fighting.
The number of Afghans flown out under the special visa program is going to “grow very quickly in the coming days,” Price said Thursday.
The viability of the U.S.trained Afghan army was looking increasingly dim. A new military assessment says Kabul could come under Taliban pressure as soon as September and, if current trends hold, the country could fall to the Taliban within a few months.
Shortly before Price’s announcement of the evacuation of some embassy staff, the embassy urged U.S. citizens to leave immediately — reiterating a warning it first issued last weekend.
The latest drawdown will further limit the ability of the embassy to conduct business, although Price maintained that it still could function. Nonessential personnel already had been moved from the embassy in April after Biden’s withdrawal announcement that same month, and it was not immediately clear how many staff members would remain at the heavily fortified compound. As of Thursday, there were roughly 4,200 staff members at the embassy, but most of those are Afghans, according to the State Department.
Apart from a complete evacuation and shuttering of the embassy, Price said other contingency plans were being weighed, including possibly moving its operations to the airport.
The State Department has said the embassy will remain open but most of its functions and personnel are expected to be moved to Hamid Karzai International Airport to prepare for a potential evacuation.
Britain also was sending 600 troops to Afghanistan on a short-term basis to help its citizens leave the country.
Canada was sending special forces to help Canadians leave Kabul, a source familiar with the plan told The Associated Press. That official, who was not authorized to talk publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity, did not say how many special forces would be sent.
ORDERS TO DESTROY
The U.S. Embassy staff in Kabul has been told to start destroying sensitive material, underscoring that the Biden administration is preparing for the possibility that the embassy will be overrun by the Taliban.
The management notice to all American personnel, sent early Friday from the embassy facilities manager, asks staff members to “reduce the amount of sensitive material on the property,” according to a copy obtained by Bloomberg News. It asks that they destroy anything with U.S. logos, flags “or items which could be misused in propaganda efforts.”
The email details the ways diplomats can destroy material: Use burn bins and shredders for paper, a disintegrator for electronics, incinerators for medical waste and a compactor that “can crush items that are too big for the disintegrator.” It says the embassy will offer what it calls “destruction support” between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. until further notice.
“These destruction methods are not appropriate for weapons, ammunition and similar items,” it reads.
Two administration officials, who discussed the internal memo on condition of anonymity, said the destruction procedure is standard when a U.S. outpost abroad is being scaled down. One of the officials said it’s consistent with established plans for most U.S. forces in Afghanistan to depart by the end of the month but acknowledged that the Taliban’s advances played a role.
In Washington, the department’s Diplomatic Security Bureau began preparing for a crisis, calling on volunteers with “High Threat, High Risk” and overseas experience for “potential 24/7 operations supporting U.S. Embassy Kabul,” according to a separate memo sent to staff members.
“The whole thing is about to go bad,” said one State Department official who works on security matters. Like others, this official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a tenuous, evolving situation.
TROOPS SURRENDER
Senior Afghan officials and hundreds of Afghan government forces in the country’s west and south surrendered Friday to the Taliban after the militants overran three key cities, inching the country closer to collapse.
The recent advances by the militant group, largely achieved with little resistance from Afghan government forces despite years of U.S. training and support, are isolating the Afghan capital with stunning speed, increasingly weakening the administration of President Ashraf Ghani.
In the western city of Herat, an entire Afghan army corps crumbled, with hundreds of troops handing over their weapons to the Taliban and others fleeing, according to local officials. The surrender deal was brokered, they said, by a group of Taliban leaders who met with Afghan government and security forces at the military base where they were holed up after the city was overrun Thursday.
The province’s governor, intelligence chief, chief of police and a prominent anti-Taliban militia leader also resigned their posts in exchange for Taliban protection, said Ghulam Habib Hashimi, a legislative official.
The Taliban’s advance across the nation’s south Friday, staggering in speed and scale, leaves the insurgents holding half of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals and controlling roughly two-thirds of the country.
In the southern province of Helmand, where U.S. and British Marines sustained heavy casualties in a fraught, yearslong fight to repel the Taliban and shore up the local government, hundreds of Afghan forces surrendered and ceded control of the capital, Lashkar Gah, according to Mirwais Khadem, a parliament member.
And in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, government control has shrunk to the airport and adjoining military base. Sayed Ahmad Seylab, a provincial council member, said Afghan forces and officials retreated from the main government compound to “avoid civilian casualties and the destruction of Kandahar city.”
The mass surrenders of Afghan security forces and government personnel are accelerating Taliban advances across Afghanistan, undercutting the military’s morale and supplying the militants with weaponry.
“The whole thing is about to go bad,” said one State Department official who works on security matters. Like others, this official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a tenuous, evolving situation.
U.N. STATEMENT
U.N. Security Council members are considering a proposed statement that would urge an immediate end to the Taliban offensive and warn that the U.N.’s most powerful body will not support any government in Afghanistan imposed by military force or restoration of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate that ruled the country from 1996 to 2001.
The proposed presidential statement, a step below a resolution, also would condemn the Taliban’s attacks on cities and towns across Afghanistan “in the strongest terms” and reaffirm that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan.
The draft statement, obtained Friday by The Associated Press, urges the Afghan government and the Taliban “to engage without delay,” with equal participation of women, and make “immediate and sustained progress toward achieving an inclusive, just durable and realistic political settlement” to their long conflict.
Council diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity because consultations have been private, said some of the 15 council members have not yet commented on the proposed statement, drafted by Norway and Estonia, so any action is unlikely until next week.
Information for this article was contributed by Robert Burns, Matthew Lee, Ellen Knickmeyer and Rob Gillies of The Associated Press; by Susannah George, Ezzatullah Mehrdad, Rachel Pannett, John Hudson, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan and Sammy Westfall of The Washington Post; and by Jennifer Jacobs, Nick Wadhams and Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg News (TNS).