U.S. and European officials are racing to evacuate Kabul as the Taliban’s entry into the city complicates an already-abrupt drawdown of the Western diplomatic presence in Afghanistan.
As U.S. personnel are being moved from the Embassy to the airport to ensure their operations maintain security and safety, a Western official at the scene informed the Washington Examiner of “gunfire at the airport.”
The development spurred a security alert from U.S. Embassy officials, “instructing U.S. citizens to shelter in place.” Most of the U.S. Embassy staff in Kabul have been evacuated to the airport, where U.S. troops ordered into the city by President Joe Biden are working to secure their departure and that of European allies.
“Embassy’s staff was relocated to the airport,” a European official told the Washington Examiner. “It’s now up to the military to carry out the operation.”
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On Saturday, President Joe Biden announced that 5,000 U.S. military personnel would support that effort, a substantial increase from the 3,000-person force that received the assignment earlier this week.
“I think it shows that we were prepared,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted on Sunday in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. “The President was prepared for every contingency as this moved forward. We had those forces on hand, and they were able to deploy very quickly, again, to make sure that we could move out safely and securely as the situation on the ground changed.”
Last month, Biden maintained that Afghan security forces could withstand the Taliban offensive, while State Department officials touted the potential for peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government to produce a political settlement. Biden put the blame for the crisis on the Afghan government as the Taliban approached the city.
“One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” the president said Saturday. “And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”
Still, from the perspective of U.S. allies in the country, the chaotic departure was an avoidable crisis brought about by Biden’s decision to withdraw American forces despite disagreement from European partners who were “quite skeptical,” as one official put it, about U.S. claims regarding the Afghan military and the peace process.
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“There was no option for allies that had a basically different view of the situation,” the European official said. “We were not in a situation to stay in Afghanistan without U.S. leadership, without U.S. support. … So they decided to go, and they had an opinion that this could work. So, now it seems that the U.S. relied [on an] assessment that was not probably correct.”
