WASHINGTON : The Biden administration on Sunday all but ruled out a U.S. diplomatic presence in Afghanistan after Aug. 31, raising questions about America’s ability to protect vulnerable Afghans who served alongside U.S. forces and diplomats in America’s longest war.

       “That’s not likely to happen," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on NBC’s “Meet the Press," adding that the U.S. is committed to helping people leave the country before or after the US withdrawal.

       “There’s no deadline on that effort," he said. “We have mechanisms to help facilitate the ongoing departure of people from Afghanistan if they choose to leave."

       With the war in Afghanistan now in its final hours, almost all the remaining U.S. embassy staffers have packed up and left Kabul, essentially bringing to an end any mass processing of potential evacuees, a U.S. official said.

       Less than half a dozen consular-services people will remain on a temporary basis, but their role in evacuating any remaining applicants will be limited, the official said.

       Republicans have criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S. pullout.

       Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Fox News Sunday that Afghanistan could be “much worse" than the 1975 fall of Saigon, “because after we left Saigon, there weren’t Vietnamese terrorists who were planning on attacking us here at home."

       “This is one of the worst foreign-policy decisions in American history," he said.

       Mr. Blinken said the U.S. will retain the capacity “to find and to take strikes against terrorists who want to do us harm."

       “In country after country, including places like Yemen, like Somalia, large parts of Syria, Libya, places where we don’t have boots on the ground on any kind of ongoing basis, we have the capacity to go after people who are trying to do us harm," he said on NBC.

       The Pentagon on Saturday released the names of 13 Americans—11 Marines, a Navy corpsman and an Army soldier—killed Thursday in Kabul when a suicide bomb detonated outside the airport gates. More than 200 Afghans who had been among the crush of people trying to get through the airport gates, were also killed.

       On Sunday, the Pentagon said it launched an unmanned drone strike, targeting a vehicle carrying suspected suicide bombers near Kabul airport.

       The U.S. believed it successfully struck the vehicle but couldn’t say how many bombers were hit. “Significant secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material," a military official said.

       The initial battlefield assessment concluded that no civilians had been killed, the military official said.

       It is the second U.S. strike since Thursday’s bombing near Hamid Karzai International Airport.

       In a new security alert issued early Sunday in Kabul, the State Department advised all U.S. citizens to immediately leave three of the airport’s gates and avoid traveling to the airport, citing a “specific, credible threat." Officials didn’t respond to questions about the nature of the threat.

       Mr. Biden said Saturday that he had been briefed another attack was “highly likely" and that he had ordered his military commanders to “take every possible measure to prioritize force protection." The U.S. early Saturday conducted airstrikes in Afghanistan against ISIS-K, the group that claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack, killing two individuals whom the Pentagon described as a planner and a facilitator.

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       The U.S. has been relying heavily on the Taliban to review paperwork, manage crowds and help to handle security around the Hamid Karzai International Airport.

       “We are going to have to see exactly what happens in the weeks and months ahead in terms of how the Taliban conducts itself, what the security situation is in the country," Mr. Blinken said on “ABC This Week." “We’re going to be very, very actively engaged diplomatically, certainly in the region, and we’ll see what the prospects are and possibilities are down the road for being in Afghanistan itself."

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