Our live coverage of the situation in Afghanistan has moved here.
Like hundreds of other Kabul residents, Aisha Ahmad scurried to the Hamid Karzi International Airport on Monday, hoping to catch a flight out of the country as it became apparent the government would fall to the Taliban.
Ahmad did not make it out. On Twitter, she asked for help from a third country, only to receive death threats, she said.
The 22-year-old university student recounted her experience to CNN and explained why she’s fearful for the future.
Her experience at the airport: Ahmad said she got a call from a friend in the United States and was told that people were being ferried out of Afghanistan on military flights. She didn’t believe it at first, but when a second friend called and said the same thing, she thought they might both be right.
The streets were quiet as she ran to the airport, except for the occasional crackle of gunshots. People were calm and looked curious.
But at the airport, Ahmad said “there were thousands of people, including many without passports and little security. She got stuck.
“The crowds were pushed by police,” she said. “Kids and women were on the ground.”
Ahmad said it felt like “doomsday.”
Though she did not manage to make it out of Kabul, she escaped the airport with only scrapes and bruises.
Will she go back to school: Taliban spokesman and leaders have said that they plan to run an “inclusive Islamic government” and allow women and girls to go to school. Many Afghans are deeply skeptical of those claims because it’s a major departure from the fundamentalist, totalitarian tendencies that marked the group’s time in power in the 1990s.
“Some people say the Taliban have changed, others say that they have not,” Ahmad said. “To be honest now I do not believe the Taliban.”
Taliban leaders have said that people should continue to go about their day-to-day lives for now, including women who go to school. Ahmad said based on what she sees on TV, she thinks she can go back to school but isn’t exactly sure.
She fears that she will not be able to finish her university education and worries that things will start getting harder for women in the days and weeks ahead
“Definitely there will be restrictions for women, but we do not know how much,” Ahmad said.
“People are not much outside, and they do not know how their daily activity will be when life is back to normal. Will they force stores to close during prayer time? Will there be punishment for not going to the mosque, will they force people to go? … No one knows,” she said.
Former US President George W. Bush, the first American President to preside over the war in Afghanistan, and first lady Laura Bush said their “hearts are heavy” after watching fall of the Afghan government and the Taliban’s resurgence.
The couple said they and their team at the George W. Bush Presidential Center “stand ready as Americans to lend our support and assistance in this time of need.”
Operation Enduring Freedom, the official name of the campaign targeting those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, began on October 7, 2001, when US and British forces began striking al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan. Though the Taliban regime fell quickly, the war continued for the next 20 years, becoming the longest war in US history.
Read the Bush’s statement here:
Matthew Dowd, a former strategist for President George W. Bush, said that though the Taliban’s takeover is tragic, the American public is “exhausted” after 20 years of war in Afghanistan.
A poll from ABC News and Ipsos conducted on July 23 and 24 found that 55% of Americans approved of President Joe Biden’s handling of the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, while 41% disapproved.
Dowd told CNN’s Don Lemon he believes the American public still wants to see the military out of Afghanistan. Though the horrific pictures coming out of the country may open Biden up to scrutiny and criticism in the short-term, he does not think it will be an issue “in a potential reelection for him, or even in the midterms.”
“The American public wanted us out of there, and we’re getting out of there, actually way later than the American public wanted us (to).”
China is willing to work with the US for a “soft landing of the Afghan issue” to prevent the country from becoming a humanitarian disaster and breeding ground for terrorism, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Beijing said in a statement.
The statement from China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said the two countries should find places to cooperate but warned that the United States could not count on China’s support and cooperation while impeding China’s “legitimate rights and interest.”
The State Department said the two diplomats discussed “the security situation and our respective efforts to bring US and PRC citizens to safety.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addressed the situation in an Afghanistan in an interview with CNN affiliate KWCH, saying that the “deterrence model” under former President Donald Trump’s administration worked.
Here’s what Pompeo said:
By the time images of desperate Afghans clinging to American warplanes began emerging from Kabul on Monday morning, President Joe Biden had conceded to aides he had little choice but to interrupt his stay at Camp David to return to the White House.
He had been facing calls, even from his political allies, to speak out on the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. His top aides had begun publicly admitting they were caught off guard by the speed with which the Afghan military would collapse but wanted the situation in Kabul to stabilize before Biden addressed the nation. And his own words from earlier this summer describing a Taliban takeover as “unlikely” were aggravating the sense of a commander-in-chief caught badly off guard.
During briefings, the President quizzed his team about how they could have misjudged the time it would take for the Afghan army to collapse, according to people familiar with the matter. He has also voiced dismay at the failure of Ashraf Ghani, the ousted Afghan president who fled the country on Sunday, to adhere to a plan he laid out in the Oval Office in June to prevent the Taliban from taking over major cities.
Throughout the weekend, Biden had remained at the presidential retreat, receiving briefings on screens or over the phone while sitting alone at conference table. Advisers huddled separately to discuss when and how he should address the situation. When he returned to the White House midday Monday, many of his aides assumed he would at least spend the night.
Yet almost as soon as Biden touched down in Washington, word went out that his stay at the executive mansion would be brief. After his 18-minute speech, Biden quickly decamped again for the mountains.
As advisers worked feverishly on Monday to calibrate the President’s speech, there was far less worry about the predictable criticism from Republicans than about how Biden’s own words and calculations over the last several months had been so wrong. The episode puts into sharp relief two of Biden’s most marked political traits: A stubborn defensive streak and a fierce certainty in his decision-making that allows little room for second-guessing.
Those traits led to an air of defiance hanging over the White House on Monday, but remarkable images of the chaos in Kabul – which the President called “gut wrenching” – stood as irrefutable evidence of failure. The task of what to do next will be left to Biden.
Read more:
There’s a wide range of opinions among Afghanistan war veterans about the US withdrawal, said Tom Porter, an Afghanistan veteran and the executive vice president for government relations at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). Stressing he doesn’t speak for everyone, Porter said some veterans feel the withdrawal was overdue while others believe the United States should have stayed to prevent any violence.
“They are wondering, was their loved ones’ service worth it?”
The images coming out of Afghanistan are quickly building a narrative, he said, that is going to shape veterans’ views about the past 20 years.
“That’s going to color the way veterans and service members think about the end of their service, the result of their service,” Porter said. “Everybody in the community’s going to be looking to see, how is history going to remember what we did over there?”
Gerald Keen, who served in Afghanistan, told CNN’s Pamela Brown he knew this time would come. But he disagrees with the way the withdrawal has unfolded, believing American soldiers should not be sent back to do a job he feels should have been done prior to the closure of Bagram Airfield.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved the deployment of 1,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, a defense official told CNN on Sunday, for a total of 6,000 US troops expected to be in country.
“Now we’ve got to send soldiers back in harm’s way to help evacuate the embassies and these interpreters who fought side by side with us every day,” Keen said.
Much of veterans’ anxiety is tied to the effort of getting out those who helped the United States at risk to their families’ lives, said Jeremy Butler, IAVA’s chief executive.
The US State Department has said there are some 20,000 Afghans who have applied for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) to be able to come to the United States. As of Friday, 1,200 Afghans and their families had been evacuated to America as part of the administration’s “Operation Allies Refuge,” and administration officials said they would accelerate efforts to get the applicants and their families out of Afghanistan and to the United States or a third country.
Even with the accelerated pace of SIV relocation, there are tens of thousands of other Afghans who worked alongside the United States who either are stuck in the pipeline or do not qualify for the program and will need to pursue other ways out, such as the administration’s new Afghan refugee designation.
Read the full story here.
The Pentagon said they “absolutely” did plan for “the possibility that the Taliban would make significant gains throughout the country,” but press secretary John Kirby declined to say whether President Biden was briefed.
“One of the things that we couldn’t anticipate and didn’t anticipate was the degree to which Afghan forces capitulated sometimes without a fight,” he continued.
Kirby would not say if the Department of Defense informed Biden, who said he did not see that happening, of the possibility of a swift Taliban takeover.
He further said that the Pentagon had anticipated possibly needing a surge of troops to protect the airport in Kabul, which is what let to them being able to deploy forces more quickly.
“I think when you look at the images out of Kabul that would have been difficult for anybody to predict,” said Kirby “Now, could we have predicted every single scenario and every single breach around the perimeter of the airport with only a couple of thousand troops on the ground? Absolutely you know there are changes that happen.”
State Department spokesperson Ned Price on Monday said “there has not been a formal transfer of power” from the Afghan government to the Taliban following the capitulation of former President Ashraf Ghani, and said the US was working with the international community as to who the US recognizes as the leader of Afghanistan.
Price did not rule out US recognition of a Taliban government, saying that it would be dependent upon their actions.
“The fact is that a future Afghan government that upholds the basic rights of its people, that doesn’t harbor terrorists and that protects the basic rights of its people, including the basic fundamental rights of half of its population, its women and girls, that is a government that we would be able to work with,” he said.
“The converse is also true. We’re not going to support a government that does not do that, a government that disregards, the guarantees enshrined in basic documents like the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, that is not a government that the United States would be able to work with. That itself is important,” Price said, also noting a UN Security Council statement calling for “the establishment, through inclusive negotiations, of a new government that is united, inclusive and representative – including with the full, equal and meaningful participation of women.”
Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen claimed in a CNN interview Monday that the Taliban would allow the education of women and girls, but the militant group has a history of sharp repression of the rights of women and minorities.
State Department officials had previously said the US would not recognize a government that came to power by force.
As horrific images pour out of Kabul with residents desperately trying to flee, Democrats on Capitol Hill are grappling with the political fallout in Washington of a crisis they warned the Biden administration months ago could become a fiasco on the world stage.
Democrats are now in the midst of a political firestorm and struggling to find a way to both back President Biden on an exit from Afghanistan many thought was long overdue while acknowledging the administration made major tactical mistakes that may have been avoided.
Congressional Democrats nearly all backed Biden when he announced plans to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan in April, but many have been infuriated by the administration’s slow response to evacuating Afghans who worked alongside the US military and are now at risk. The images of a hasty withdrawal of Americans and the chaos at the Kabul airport now conflicting with the administration’s claims that they were carrying out an orderly withdrawal.
For some Democrats silence has been the best course of action. Many have not issued statements since the Taliban raced into Kabul over the weekend and seized power as former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
Republicans, meanwhile, have launched a barrage of criticism at Biden over the collapse in Afghanistan, charging that the Taliban takeover is a stain on his presidency – and one that will have political consequences that bleed into the midterm elections next year. While many of the Republicans have ignored Trump’s push for an even quicker withdrawal when he was president, they’ve argued that Biden deserves the blame for the way the drawdown of US forces has been carried out.
Democrats have defended Biden’s underlying decision, arguing that the rapid fall of the Afghan military underscored the fact that the government was likely to fall no matter when the US military pulled out.
Several Democrats and senior Biden officials have blamed the Trump administration for negotiating the drawdown with the Taliban that preceded Biden’s decision to complete the withdrawal. During a briefing call with both Republicans and Democrats Sunday, top US security officials also pointed out the failure of the Afghan army, which surrendered in many places far before the US anticipated they would.
Still, Biden has not deviated from his decision, saying in a speech on Monday that “I stand squarely behind my decision.”
Read the full story here.
Afghan journalist Nazira Karimi became emotional when pressing Pentagon press secretary John Kirby about the location of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani during a briefing.
“As you know, I’m from Afghanistan, I’m very upset today, because Afghan women didn’t expect that overnight all the Taliban came. They took off my flag. This is my flag. They put their flag. Everybody’s upset, especially women,” the reporter said to Kirby, pointing to the Afghan flag on her face mask.
The journalist went on to ask Kirby on the status of Ghani, who fled Afghanistan as the Taliban closed in on Kabul on Sunday.
“Where is my president, former President Ghani? People expected that he would be by with the people and immediately he ran away. We don’t know where is he and we don’t have a president. President Biden said that President Ghani knows he has to fight for us people, they have to do everything and we were able to financially help them. But we don’t have any president, we don’t have anything,” the journalist said.
Kirby said he could not speak for Ghani or “where he is or what his views are.”
“But let me say with all respect, that I understand. And we all understand the anxiety and the fear and the pain that you’re feeling. It’s clear and it’s evident, and nobody here at the Pentagon is happy about the images that we’ve seen coming out in the last few days,” Kirby said. “And we’re all mindful of the kind of governance that the Taliban is capable of. So heartfelt respect to what you’re going through, and we understand that.”
The Pentagon spokesperson continued: “We, too, have invested greatly in Afghanistan and in the progress that women and girls have made politically, economically, socially, and we certainly do understand and we do feel the pain that you’re feeling. Probably not to the same extent. We’re focused right now on making sure that we do the best we can for those Afghans who helped us.”
Watch the moment below:
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby today defended the US military’s chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, telling CNN he took issue with any characterization of the situation at Hamid Karzai International Airport as a planning failure.
“I would take issue with your designation of this operation at the airport as a failure,” said Kirby, after CNN’s Barbara Starr asked him “what failed in your planning?”
“We do plan for all manner of contingencies, but it’s not a perfect process,” he continued. “Plans are not always perfectly predictive … and as is well known in military maximum, plans don’t often survive first contact, and you have to adjust in real time.”
Kirby defended the preparation of the US, saying they did plan “noncombatant evacuation operations as far back as May” and that “there were drills being done here at the Pentagon to walk through what different noncombatant evacuation operations might look like.”
Kirby said one of the exercises was done as recently as two weeks ago to examine what a noncombatant evacuation “would look like out of the Hamid Karzai International Airport.”
“And we think that those exercises did prepare us in terms of having their resources forward, secretary forward deployed troops, including Marines, off of their ship and into Kuwait so that they could be more readily available as well as other forces in the region,” he said.
“A lot of what you’re seeing transpire, the reason we can be so quick with upwards of 6,000 troop, is because we anticipated the possible need to do this,” he said, noting again that they could not have predicted “every single scenario and every single breach around the perimeter of the airport” and there are “changes that happen.”
Some more background: Violence erupted at the Kabul airport on Monday as hundreds of people poured onto the tarmac desperately seeking a route out of Afghanistan after the Taliban’s sudden seizure of power sparked a chaotic Western withdrawal.
US forces shot and killed two armed men who fired on them Monday, according to a US defense official, and the US resumed temporarily suspended operations at the airfield after clearing crowds off the runways.
Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad is continuing to engage with the Taliban and Afghan government representatives in Doha, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Monday.
Price said “the situation changed markedly when President Ghani left the country and as the Taliban continued to encroach on Kabul,” and discussions changed from focusing on peace negotiations to averting violence.
Price said the State Department team was continuing to engage with the Taliban, and “the US military has spoken to engagement with the Taliban on the ground in Kabul.”
“We are working on a couple different fronts: first and foremost, to seek to preserve calm in Kabul, to maintain a semblance of security, and very importantly to underscore that any effort, any attempt to target, to threaten, to intimidate our personnel, our operations, would be met with a swift and decisive response,” Price said.
The US military has not conducted airstrikes in the last 24 hours but commanders on the ground retain the capability, Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor, vice director for logistics of the Joint Staff, said Monday.
Americans remaining in Kabul should not travel to the airport, which is under the control of US military forces, but instead “shelter” and wait for further instructions, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said this afternoon.
“The situation is evolving quickly, and we will communicate information to US citizens as rapidly as possible,” said Price, speaking from the State Department this afternoon.
Violence erupted at the Kabul airport on Monday as hundreds of people poured onto the tarmac desperately seeking a route out of Afghanistan after the Taliban’s sudden seizure of power sparked a chaotic Western withdrawal. US forces shot and killed two armed men who fired on them Monday, according to a US defense official.
Afghanistan’s former President Hamid Karzai and the chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation Abdullah Abdullah reported having “fruitful conversations” with the Taliban Monday.
The two leaders, along with former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, formed a “coordinating council” Sunday to facilitate dialogue with the Taliban, following news the group had gained control over Kabul, and President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country.
“[Abdullah, Hekmatyar] and I continue making our efforts for further calm in the city of Kabul and the return to normal daily life; God willing, these efforts will bear fruits,” Karzai said in a Facebook video posted Monday.
Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour Monday, the spokesman for the Taliban’s political office in Doha, Suhail Shaheen, said the group is committed to an “inclusive Islamic government” in Afghanistan, but refused to say whether Abdullah or Karzai would be part of it.
Karzai served as the interim President of Afghanistan in 2001 when the Taliban was overthrown by US and NATO forces. He was subsequently elected for two consecutive terms as President in 2004 and 2009.
Karzai has signaled that he plans to stay in Afghanistan to facilitate a peaceful transition of power.
President Biden said that if the Taliban attacks US troops while they move forward with departure plans from Afghanistan, the “US presence will be swift and the response will be forceful.”
The President went on to describe the current US military mission happening on the ground now.
“Our current military mission, will be short in time, limited in scope and focused in its objectives: get our people and our allies as safely and quickly as possible. And once we have completed this mission, we will conclude our military withdrawal. We will end America’s longest war after 20 long years of bloodshed,” he said.
Watch here:
President Biden admitted that the collapse of Afghanistan’s civil government unfolded “more quickly than we had anticipated,” conceding a miscalculation in the administration’s withdraw from the two-decade long war Monday in his address to the nation.
“We were clear eyed about the risks, we planned for every contingency, but I always promised the American people that I would be straight with you,” he said.
The President then continued the administration’s efforts to shift the blame onto Afghan leaders for the fall of Kabul, saying the political leaders “gave up and fled the country.”
“So, what happened?” Biden asked. “Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country.”
Ousted Afghan President Ashraf Ghani left the country on Sunday for Tajikistan, two sources told CNN.
“The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments in the past week reinforced ending that US military involvement Afghanistan now was the right decision,” he added. “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
Biden also pointed the finger at Ghani in his speech.
“When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah, at the White House in June, and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations. We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the US military departed, to clean up the corruption in government, so the government could function for the Afghan people,” Biden said.
He continued, “We talked extensively about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically — they failed to do any of that. I also urged them to engage in diplomacy, to seek a political settlement with the Taliban. This advice was flatly refused. Mr. Ghani insisted that the Afghan forces would fight. And obviously he was wrong.”
Watch here:
President Biden today said he was unwilling to pass the decision on when to end the war in Afghanistan to a fifth presidential administration.
“I’m now the fourth American President to preside over war in Afghanistan,” he said, speaking from the White House. ”…I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president.”
Biden went on to say there would never be an easy time to end US operations, which have spanned nearly 20 years,
“I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another President… yet another one, a fifth one,” he continued.
“It’s the right one, it’s the right decision for our people, the right one for our brave service members who risked their lives serving our nation ands it’s the right one for America,” he said, concluding his remarks from the White House.
President Biden acknowledged the “many missteps” made in Afghanistan over two decades of US military presence and took some responsibility for the current situation unfolding on the ground during his remarks at the White House.
“We have to be honest, our mission in Afghanistan is taking many missteps — made many missteps over the past two decades. I’m now the fourth American president to preside over war in Afghanistan. Two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today in how we must move forward from here,” Biden said.
Watch here:
