WARSAW, Poland —
As the clock ticks down on President Biden’s reasserted deadline for a full U.S. withdrawal, a Polish official said Wednesday that his country has ended its evacuations from Afghanistan, ahead of an expected cascade of other countries following suit over the next few days.
President Biden declared Tuesday that he was sticking to his Aug. 31 deadline for completing the U.S. pullout as the Taliban insisted he must. That has increased the pressure on the already-risky airlift from Kabul to get out as many foreign nationals and vulnerable Afghans as possible in the coming days following the Taliban’s dramatic takeover of the war-torn nation.
European allies pressed for more time but lost the argument, and as a practical matter they may be forced to end their evacuations a couple of days before the last American troops leave. Several countries haven’t said yet when they plan to end their operations, perhaps hoping to avoid yet another fatal crush at the Kabul airport, which is one of the last avenues out of the country.
Thousands of people are still thought to be trying to leave, and it’s not clear that everyone who wants to will be able to before the end of the month. But any decision by Biden to stay longer could reignite a war between the Taliban and American troops and other coalition forces who are running the airlift.
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“Due to extreme tension on the ground ... and the scheduled departure of American forces, these evacuations are a true race against time,” French government spokesman Gabriel Attal said Wednesday. He said that his country’s evacuation would likely end “a few hours, maybe a few days ahead” of the American departure.
With the deadline looming, Marcin Przydacz, a Polish deputy foreign minister, said Wednesday that a group of people taken from Kabul who are now in Uzbekistan was the last evacuated by Poland. He said his nation made its decision to not continue operations after consulting with U.S. and British officials.
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“After a long analysis of reports on the security situation, we cannot risk the lives of our diplomats and of our soldiers any longer,” Przydacz said.
A number of troops will remain briefly to wrap up operations, Przydacz said. Poland has used over a dozen planes to bring hundreds of evacuees to Warsaw. Some later traveled on to other countries.
The Czech Republic declared its own evacuation mission complete last week, and Hungary said it plans to end its operations soon.
The White House said Wednesday that about 19,000 people were evacuated from Kabul over the last 24 hours. It said the U.S. has evacuated or facilitated the evacuation of about 82,300 people since the Taliban takeover in mid-August.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the military will “continue to evacuate needed populations all the way to the end.” But he added that in the final days and hours, there will have to be a balance as the 5,400 troops in Kabul and critical systems also need to be withdrawn.
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In Kabul itself, life has been slow to return to normal, but many people — especially women — are staying inside, fearful of the Taliban or the general instability.
Kabul Mayor Dawood Sultanzoy said many city workers have yet to return to work, with the absence of experienced staff hindering normal operations. But he said the city has begun to remove the blast walls that became ubiquitous in recent years as the Taliban and other armed groups carried out bombings and other attacks against the Western-backed government.
The Taliban say the decades of war are over and there will be no revenge attacks on people who opposed them. But many Afghans distrust the group, and there have been reports of summary executions and other abuses in areas under Taliban control. Many fear a return to the Taliban’s hard-line Islamist rule of the 1990s, when women were largely confined to their homes.
Chaos at the Kabul airport has transfixed the world after the Taliban’s blitz across Afghanistan saw it seize control of a nation that received hundreds of billions of dollars in reconstruction aid and security support since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
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Reps. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) flew unannounced into Kabul airport in the middle of the ongoing chaotic evacuation Tuesday.
Afghans poured onto the tarmac last week, and some clung to a U.S. military transport plane as it took off, later plunging to their deaths. At least seven people died that day, and another seven died Sunday in a panicked stampede.
Thousands have thronged the airport in the days since, and the U.S. and its allies have worked to speed the evacuation in recent days, sometimes flying people out before their paperwork is fully processed and bringing them to transit points in Europe or Asia. On Wednesday, a group of 51 people landed in Uganda, which became the first African nation to host evacuees.
European nations, including American allies Germany and Britain, had pressed for a longer period to continue evacuations past the deadline next week. CIA chief William Burns even traveled to Kabul on Monday to meet the Taliban’s top political leader. However, Biden has stuck to the August date, even after an emergency online summit of the Group of Seven nations.
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That left European nations with no choice but to abide by the deadline.
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“That the overall deployment literally stands and falls with the stance of the militarily strongest member of the alliance, the U.S., was always clear to us,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a speech to parliament.
“We will continue the evacuation operation for as long as possible, in order also to make it possible for Afghans who worked with us for security, freedom, the rule of law and development to leave the country,” she added.
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She did not give a date for the last German evacuation flight but said that even after that effort ended, the country would work to see if it could continue to help people “through civilian use of Kabul airport.”
For now, the U.S. military coordinates all air traffic in and out of the Kabul airport. Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen wrote on Twitter that they planned to allow people to fly out of Kabul airport via commercial flights after the August deadline.
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However, it remained unclear what commercial carriers would immediately resume flights to an airport fully under Taliban control. On Wednesday, a stream of military planes took off from the airfield as evacuees lined up on the tarmac. The desperate remained outside, some standing knee-deep in sewage and waving identity documents at Western soldiers in hopes of being allowed to go beyond the barbed-wire fencing and onto a flight out.
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While the final withdrawal date is just under a week away, analyst Patricia Lewis said the practical deadline for the evacuations to stop was “the next couple of days.”
“You can’t just say, ‘OK, midnight, we’ll stop now, we’ll just pack up gently,’” said Lewis, director of the international security program at the Chatham House international affairs think tank in London. “There’s a huge amount of stuff that has to be done, including getting all the people out who are doing the job and all the equipment.”
“All of the allies are highly dependent on the U.S. for military cover, particularly air cover,” Lewis said. “They can’t put their own people at risk, so it really depends on when the U.S. starts packing up.”