Biden says move out of Afghanistan could be extended beyond Aug. 31

President Biden said Sunday that the U.S. military is “executing a plan” to move stranded Americans to the Kabul airport in greater numbers, including through an expansion of a safe zone around the facility and by creating conduits for people to access the compound “safely and effectively.”

“Our first priority in Kabul,” Biden said in remarks at the White House, “is getting American citizens out of the country as quickly and as safely as possible.”

In recent days, the Qatari ambassador to Afghanistan has escorted small groups of Americans into the airport, according to two people familiar with the effort who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation. Americans have been instructed to meet at rally points in the city, and the ambassador then accompanies them to guarantee safe passage, these people said. Qatar has served as an intermediary between the United States and the Taliban at several stages of the American withdrawal, sponsoring peace talks and serving as the first point of refuge for many evacuees.

The operational shift comes as U.S. commanders gear up for what officials hope will be a significant acceleration of evacuations from Afghanistan in coming days, enlisting domestic commercial airliners and a number of foreign allies to aid the effort.

Evacuations had slowed over the past couple of days as backlogs in waystations such as Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar prevented planeloads of people from departing Kabul, grounding planned flights out and degrading humanitarian conditions at the overcrowded airport.

Biden said Sunday that the mobilization represented a “first stage,” leaving the possibility that more flights could be added to the effort.

On Saturday, the U.S. military operated 14 evacuation flights that took about 3,900 people out of the country, while 35 other planes moved about the same number, according to White House and Pentagon officials. That’s up twofold from Friday — but still short of the 5,000 to 9,000 people per day that senior military officials have said they have the capability to evacuate themselves.

The backlog of potential evacuees remains significant — particularly at the Kabul airport, where people have been waiting for days in increasingly squalid conditions to learn when it may be their turn to board a plane to safety. More than 10,000 people had crammed themselves inside the airport perimeter on Sunday, and more clamored to get in.

President Biden addressed the nation on Sunday and warned the American public that the security situation on the ground in Afghanistan is “rapidly changing,” adding that terrorist groups may seek to take advantage of the turmoil and target civilians.

The president underlined the security challenges American troops face as they carry on with the chaotic evacuation efforts of U.S. citizens and Afghan allies and as thousands of other Afghans crowd Hamid Karzai International Airport to try to flee the country that the Taliban took over last week.

“We know that terrorists may seek to exploit the situation and target innocent Afghans,” the president said Sunday, adding that American troops are monitoring the situation and working to disrupt security threats.

One “likely source” of these threats is an Islamic State cell based in Afghanistan, “ISIS-K,” Biden said, adding that the group is a “sworn enemy of the Taliban.”

“We are under no illusions about the threat,” the president added.

Although troops are working to evacuate people and have expanded the security perimeter of the airport, Biden said, civilians “face risks of attacks from ISIS-K from the distance.”

Earlier Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN that the Islamic State poses an “acute” threat to Americans in Afghanistan.

“The threat is real. It is acute. It is persistent. And it is something we are focused on with every tool in our arsenal,” Sullivan said, adding that the military and intelligence officials are working to prevent potential attacks, particularly those targeting crowds at the airport.

President Biden is expected to discuss how his administration is dealing with two crises during a 4 p.m. address to the nation: its response to Hurricane Henri in the northeastern United States as well as its continuing efforts in Afghanistan to rescue U.S. citizens and Afghans seeking special visas given the dangerous conditions there.

One week after the Taliban swept into the Afghan capital, pressure is mounting as the situation remains dire at the Kabul airport. Top administration officials spent much of Sunday morning defending their evacuation efforts. The U.S. military has evacuated about 17,000 people from Kabul, including 2,500 Americans, Pentagon officials said Saturday

The president’s address from the Roosevelt Room at the White House will come after Biden attends a closed-door meeting on Afghanistan with his national security team, the Hill reported.

“It has been the most challenging week he has had, no doubt about it,” Democratic strategist Mike Morey, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), told the Hill.

Taliban forces fired in the air and used batons to make people line up in orderly queues outside the Kabul airport on Sunday, witnesses said, a day after at least seven people died in a crush at the gates.

One of those killed was a toddler. The 2-year-old daughter of a former interpreter was trampled to death as crowds surged outside an airport gate, the New York Times reported.

“I felt pure terror,” the woman told the Times in a telephone interview from Kabul. “I couldn’t save her.”

On Sunday, there were no major injuries yet reported as gunmen beat back the crowds and long lines of people were being formed, the witnesses told Reuters. The British military confirmed that seven Afghan civilians had died on Saturday amid chaotic crowds scrambling to board planes out of the country.

“Our sincere thoughts are with the families of the seven Afghan civilians who have sadly died in crowds in Kabul,” a spokesperson for Britain’s Defense Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

“Conditions on the ground remain extremely challenging but we are doing everything we can to manage the situation as safely and securely as possible.”

The Pentagon, on Saturday, strongly hinted that U.S. troops may stage further operations outside the Kabul airport to help evacuate stranded American citizens and Afghans who aided the war effort, amid increased concerns about potential attacks by the Islamic State.

International troops are struggling to fly thousands out of Kabul, with significant bottlenecks, paperwork and crushing crowds since the Taliban seized the capital city last Sunday, triggering a rush of fearful people desperate to leave.

On Sunday, an official with the Taliban’s Cultural Commission, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, told the Al Jazeera media network that a general amnesty was in place and expressed regret over the crush of people trying to enter the airport to escape the country. “This hysteria that has taken place is unfounded,” he said.

Taliban fighters were manning checkpoints outside the airport while the U.S. forces and their allies control the interior, Balkhi added. “We are in talks and we have a working relationship with the Americans about the security arrangements,” he said.

Mike Mullen, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Barack Obama, said he made faulty assumptions that the United States could train Afghan forces and build an effective, modern army. He said that he was wrong in those assumptions and now has regrets.

“What I thought we could do, and I advised President Obama accordingly, is I thought we could turn it around,” he said Sunday. “Obviously I was wrong.”

On ABC’s “This Week,” he said he agreed with President Biden that the United States should have started preparing to exit Afghanistan after completing the mission of killing Osama bin Laden.

“I think in retrospect, yeah, we should have,” Mullen said. “I don’t think it was possible for us to just abruptly walk away right after we killed bin Laden. But clearly we could have gone earlier than we did.”

He said that Biden “had it right” back then: “He was focused singly on counterterrorism, and his advice was along those lines and he certainly said that. And I give him credit for that.”

Asked whether the mission has turned out to be a failure, Mullen said that history will judge it somewhere in the middle.

“I think complete failure, no,” he said, adding: “Clearly, taking out bin Laden was a huge impact in terms of al-Qaeda and what was represented there. I’m not inclined to just lay it on, yes, it was a success or it was a failure. I think we’re somewhere in between.”

President Biden has announced plans to meet virtually with the leaders of the Group of Seven on Tuesday, as the administration continued to scramble to address the chaos in Afghanistan.

The leaders will continue discussing efforts to evacuate their citizens and Afghan allies from that country, as well as to provide humanitarian assistance for Afghan refugees, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Sunday.

Meanwhile, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said there are “sufficient forces” to secure the Kabul airport but did not rule out sending additional U.S. troops if needed. Chaotic and sometimes violent scenes have unfolded at the airport as thousands of people attempt to flee Afghanistan.

“Every single day the president asks his military commanders, including those at the airport and those at the Pentagon, whether they need additional resources, additional troops. So far, the answer has been no, but he will ask again today,” Sullivan said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

Sullivan also defended the military’s decision to leave Bagram air base before American civilians were evacuated, saying that was the recommendation of national security experts at the Pentagon and elsewhere.

“When it comes to Bagram, the best military advice that we received was that, number one, Bagram was an immense facility that would be difficult to secure over time and put our troops at risk,” Sullivan said. “And second, it didn’t logistically make sense from an evacuation perspective because it is located outside of Kabul and both American diplomats, American citizens and most of the Afghans at risk live inside Kabul.”

On “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) blasted the decision to “abandon” Bagram as “one of the stupidest military blunders in all of U.S. history,” saying it had hampered evacuation efforts because it left the United States reliant on a single civilian airport with only one runway.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a combat veteran, said on ABC News’s “This Week” that the United States should “absolutely” be sending convoys into Kabul to retrieve Americans and their allies.

“The Taliban needs to understand quite clearly that we have the right to get our citizens out of Afghanistan,” she added. “And if that means we have to escort them to the airport to get them out, then we will do so.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered the activation of a program that will use 18 commercial airplanes to aid the U.S. military evacuation of American nationals and refugees in Afghanistan.

The activation of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet will provide the Defense Department with “access to commercial air mobility resources” in the evacuation efforts, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said in a statement Sunday.

The activation is for 18 aircraft: Three each from American Airlines, Atlas Air, Delta Air Lines and Omni Air; two from Hawaiian Airlines; and four from United Airlines.

“The Department does not anticipate a major impact to commercial flights from this activation,” the statement added.

The commercial planes will not fly into Kabul airport but instead will be used “for the onward movement of passengers from temporary safe havens and interim staging bases,” the statement said — probably from Persian Gulf Arab nations such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where many Afghans are awaiting next steps.

This is the third such activation of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, a program created in 1952, the statement said. It was previously used in connection with the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War.

“The airline is proud and grateful of our pilots and flight attendants, who will be operating these trips to be a part of this life-saving effort,” American Airlines said in a statement, with three planes ready Monday to head to military bases and secure transit points in Europe and the Arabian Peninsula. “The images from Afghanistan are heartbreaking.”

A statement by United Airlines said it will participate as “a global airline and flag carrier for our country. We embrace the responsibility to quickly respond to international challenges like these and use our expertise to ensure the safe passage of our fellow countrymen and women as well as those who have risked their lives to help keep them safe.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declined Sunday to say whether he would ask President Biden to extend the Aug. 31 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan if not all evacuations have been completed by then.

On ABC News’s “This Week,” Austin reiterated Biden’s pledge to evacuate every American, as well as Afghans who aided the war effort. But he stopped short of saying whether the U.S. military would send convoys to help them get to the airport.

“If you have an American passport and if you have the right credentials, the Taliban has been allowing people to pass safely through,” Austin said.

“This Week” host Martha Raddatz challenged him, saying there were instances in which that wasn’t the case.

“There’s no such thing as an absolute in this kind of environment, as you would imagine,” Austin said. “There have been incidents of people having tough encounters with the Taliban. As we learn about those incidents, we certainly go back and engage the Taliban leadership and press home to them that our expectation is that they allow our people with appropriate credentials to get through the checkpoints.”

Austin declined to characterize the threat levels at Kabul’s airport, and he would not say whether he would ask Biden to keep troops in Afghanistan beyond Aug. 31.

“We’re going to continue to assess the situation and, again, work as hard as we can to get as many people out as possible,” he said. “As we approach that deadline, we’ll make a recommendation to the president.”

According to White House officials, 23 U.S. military flights have evacuated about 3,900 personnel over roughly the past 24 hours; about 25,100 people have been evacuated on U.S. military and coalition flights since Aug. 14.

Austin said the top priority was to keep the Kabul airport secure.