Biden vows to pull out Americans, cites risks
He defends decision to leave Afghanistan
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Friday promised to bring home any American still trapped in Afghanistan, calling the evacuation effort for Americans and vulnerable Afghans “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.”
But he acknowledged that he did not know how many Americans were still in the country or if they could ultimately be brought out safely.
“Let me be clear: Any American who wants to come home, we will get you home,” Biden said, before adding, “I cannot promise what the final outcome will be or that it will be without the risk of loss.”
He also remained staunchly committed to his decision to pull U.S. troops from the country, telling reporters, “Does anybody truly believe that I would not have had to put in significantly more American forces? Send your
sons, your daughters, like my son was sent to Iraq, to maybe die?”
Seeking to give a sense of how many people had been flown out of the country in the days since Afghanistan’s collapse, Biden said that some 18,000 people had been airlifted from the country since July. This week, he said, Afghans including women leaders — and American journalists including staff members of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal — had been safely flown out of the country.
Biden said he would commit to airlifting Afghans who had been helpful to the 20-year war effort but Americans were his first priority.
The president’s remarks were delivered amid wrenching images as people begged to be evacuated from the airport in Kabul, the bottlenecked and sole point of departure for Americans and Afghans trying to flee the Taliban takeover.
The administration has faced an international outcry over how quickly Afghanistan collapsed as U.S. forces stood down, as well as increasing questions over how much military and intelligence officials knew about the tenuous situation on the ground.
Scenes of chaos and desperation have added to the scrutiny over Biden’s defense of his decision to pull the troops out. Biden called the images of the past week “heartbreaking” and said the United States had “6,000 of America’s finest fighting men and women” working to restore order at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul and get people out of the country.
On Friday, Biden, who had been back and forth from vacation spots at Camp David and Wilmington, Del., took questions for the first time this week and continued to defend his decision.
“What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al-Qaida gone?” Biden asked in response to a question about whether U.S. allies have been critical of the withdrawal effort. “We went and did the mission. You’ve known my position for a long, long time.”
The president’s tone was firm as he declared that “I made the decision” on the timing of the withdrawal, and that it was going to lead to difficult scenes no matter when.
On Thursday, administration officials said about 3,000 people had been evacuated, including some 350 American citizens. But by Friday afternoon, administration officials said the surge of evacuees to other countries had created a backup for third-party countries processing new arrivals.
“The commander on the ground has issued the order to recommence,” a senior administration official said in a statement Friday.
But Biden’s advisers have conceded that, for Americans and Afghans hoping to reach Kabul from cities and towns further afield, safe passage to Kabul is not guaranteed.
“We right now have established contact with the Taliban to allow for the safe passage of people to the airport, and that is working at the moment to get Americans and Afghans at risk to the airport,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said in an interview with NBC on Thursday. “That being said, we can’t count on anything.”
U.S. officials have not said how long they hope the fragile accord will hold before Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline for a total withdrawal.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said evacuations would continue “until the clock runs out, or we run out of capability.”
Some veterans in Congress were calling on the administration to extend a security perimeter beyond the airport so more Afghans could get through. The lawmakers also said they want Biden to make clear that the Aug. 31 date is not firm.
The deadline “is contributing to the chaos and the panic at the airport because you have Afghans who think that they have 10 days to get out of this country or that door is closing forever,” said Rep. Peter Meijer, R-Mich., who served in Iraq and worked in Afghanistan to help aid workers provide humanitarian relief.
TALIBAN OBSTACLES
The U.S. is struggling to pick up the pace, constrained by obstacles ranging from armed Taliban checkpoints to paperwork problems. Tens of thousands of people remain to be airlifted from the chaotic country.
Taliban fighters and their checkpoints ringed the airport — major barriers for Afghans who fear that their work with Westerners makes them targets for retribution. Hundreds of Afghans who lacked any papers or clearance for evacuation also congregated outside the airport, adding to the chaos that has prevented even some Afghans who do have papers and promises of flights from getting through.
It didn’t help that many of the Taliban fighters could not read the documents.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the military has aircraft available to evacuate 5,000 to 9,000 people per day, but until Thursday far fewer designated evacuees had been able to reach, and then enter, the airport.
Kirby told reporters that the limiting factor has been available evacuees, not aircraft. He said efforts were underway to speed processing, including adding State Department consular officers to verify paperwork of Americans and Afghans who managed to get to the airport. Additional entry gates had been opened, he said.
And yet, at the current rate it would be difficult for the U.S. to evacuate all of the Americans and Afghans who are qualified for and seeking evacuation by Aug. 31. Biden has said he would ensure that no American was left behind, even if that meant staying beyond August, an arbitrary deadline that he set weeks before the Taliban climaxed a stunning military victory by taking Kabul last weekend. It was not clear if Biden might consider extending the deadline for evacuees who aren’t American citizens.
Military evacuation flights continued, but access remained difficult for many. On Thursday, Taliban militants fired into the air to try to control the crowds gathered at the airport’s blast walls. Men, women and children fled. U.S. Navy fighter jets flew overhead, a standard military precaution but also a reminder to the Taliban that the U.S. has firepower to respond to a combat crisis.
There is no accurate figure of the number of people — Americans, Afghans or others — who are in need of evacuation, as the process is almost entirely self-selecting. For example, the State Department says that when it ordered its nonessential embassy staff to leave Kabul in April after Biden’s withdrawal announcement, fewer than 4,000 Americans had registered for security updates. The actual number, including dual U.S.-Afghan citizens along with family members, is likely much higher, with estimates ranging from 11,000 to 15,000. Tens of thousands of Afghans may also be in need of escape.
Compounding the uncertainty, the U.S. government has no way to track how many registered Americans may have left Afghanistan already. Some may have returned to the United States, and others may have gone to third countries.
At the Pentagon, Kirby declined to say whether Austin had recommended to Biden that he extend the deadline. Given the Taliban’s takeover, that would require at least the Taliban’s acquiescence, he said. He said he knew of no such talks yet between U.S. and Taliban commanders, who have been in regular touch for days to limit conflict at the airport as part of what the White House has termed a “safe passage” agreement worked out Sunday.
“I think it is just a fundamental fact of the reality of where we are, that communications and a certain measure of agreement with the Taliban on what we’re trying to accomplish has to occur,” Kirby said.
Although Afghanistan had been a hot spot for the coronavirus pandemic, the State Department said Thursday that evacuees are not required to get negative covid-19 results.
“A blanket humanitarian waiver has been implemented for covid-19 testing for all persons the U.S. government is relocating from Afghanistan,” the department said. Medical exams, including covid-19 tests, had been required for evacuees before the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, which added extra urgency to efforts to get at-risk Afghans out.
Additional American troops continued to arrive at the airport. As of Thursday there were about 5,200, including Marines who specialize in evacuation coordination and an Air Force unit that specializes in emergency airport operations. Biden has authorized a total deployment of about 6,000.
Hoping to secure evacuation seats are American citizens and other foreigners, Afghan allies of the Western forces, and women, journalists, activists and others most at risk from the fundamentalist Taliban.
In June, more than 20 diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul registered their concerns that the evacuation of Afghans who had worked for America was not proceeding quickly enough.
In a cable sent through the State Department’s dissent channel, a time-honored method for foreign service officers to register opposition to administration policies, the diplomats said the situation on the ground was dire, that the Taliban would probably seize control of the capital within months of the Aug. 31 pullout, and urged the administration to immediately begin a concerted evacuation effort, according to officials familiar with the document.
Afghans in danger because of their work with the U.S. military or U.S organizations, and Americans scrambling to get them out, also pleaded with Washington to cut the red tape.
“If we don’t sort this out, we’ll literally be condemning people to death,” said Marina Kielpinski LeGree, the American head of the nonprofit Ascend.
NATO COMMITMENT
NATO foreign ministers Friday committed to focus on ensuring the safe evacuation of their citizens and Afghans deemed at risk, centering on improving operations at the airport first.
Faced with continuing chaos in the capital and the exit roads, many of the 30 allied nations raised “the need to work harder on how we can get more people … into the airport, then processed and then onto the planes,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.
He called that “the big, big, big challenge.”
All too often over the past hours and days, planes from NATO nations have been able to get to Kabul only to be forced to leave empty or nearly empty.
Belgium, for example, sent two big C-130 planes into Kabul, but of some 500 people who had been called up to board, only “some 20 were lucky enough” to get on the first plane, Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmes said. A second plane had to return to neighboring Pakistan empty, since designated passengers could not enter the airport.
“There are Taliban controls and U.S. controls which are very strict,” Wilmes said.
She joined several other allies in calling on the United States to secure the airport for as long as it takes, even if that stretches beyond the evacuation of all U.S. nationals.
A NATO statement Friday said that “as long as evacuation operations continue, we will maintain our close operational cooperation through Allied military means” at the airport.
Stoltenberg also insisted that the Taliban have to give free passage to any Afghan wanting to leave the country.
Information for this article was contributed by Katie Rogers of The New York Times; and by Ellen Knickmeyer, Robert Burns, James LaPorta, Zeke Miller, Josh Boak, Lolita C. Baldor, Kevin Freking, Matthew Lee, Raf Casert and Barry Hatton of The Associated Press.