Western nations operating with a skeleton diplomatic presence faced agonizing decisions on Monday as they raced to airlift their own citizens out of the country while also seeking to evacuate many of the tens of thousands of Afghans who helped them during two decades of war.
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Much of Afghanistan’s diplomatic life had relocated on Sunday from the blast-wall-surrounded enclave of the Green Zone to Kabul’s international airport. There, ambassadors from Britain, France and the United States, along with others, oversaw the evacuation of citizens from their country and stamped last-minute visas for eligible Afghans.
In a day, the isolated but urbane diplomatic life of Kabul was transformed to chaos, with desperate Afghans clinging onto departing aircraft, several people shot to death and a mad scramble for available seats.
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But there were also fears of worse to come. It was unclear if Western governments would be able to continue evacuations at the airport should they lose control of the perimeter to Taliban forces. In an interview that aired on British radio on Monday, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace grew emotional as he indicated not everyone would be able to escape on evacuation flights.
“Some people won’t get back,” said Wallace, a former captain in the British army.
In an effort to coordinate on the rescuing of foreign nationals and Afghans, Secretary of State Antony Blinken phoned his Chinese and Russian counterparts on Monday afternoon to discuss “the security situation and our efforts to bring U.S. citizens and vulnerable Afghans to safety,” the State Department said.
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Many Western governments are trying to help not only their own diplomats leave the country, but also citizens left in Afghanistan as well as Afghan nationals who had worked with their nation. However, as commercial flights at the airport were suspended on Monday, there were accusations that Afghans are a lower priority.
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“The problem is less issuing visas for desperate Afghans as much as finding space for them on a plane,” said one European official. The official, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deteriorating security environment.
Western governments have struggled to coordinate an evacuation response as media organizations, nongovernmental organizations and defense firms attempt to secure flights for their own staffs. German, French and American missions will try to evacuate their own nationals first, creating anxiety and confusion about who will ultimately get out of the country, the official said.
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The United States had moved “all embassy personnel” to the airport as of late Sunday, State Department spokesman Ned Price said, and would be accelerating the evacuation of thousands of Afghans eligible for Special Immigrant Visas, nearly 2,000 of whom have already arrived in the United States over the past two weeks.
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Acting ambassador Ross Wilson had not left Afghanistan as of Monday morning, said a U.S. official.
British Ambassador Laurie Bristow stayed behind on Sunday to process visas for Afghan interpreters who had worked for Britain. About 300 British passport holders managed to depart Afghanistan on Sunday, Wallace told BBC on Monday.
Wallace added that the embassy expects to help roughly another 1,500 people leave in the coming days.
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Germany’s defense ministry had dispatched two military planes to Kabul to make airlifts to Tashkent, the capital of neighboring Uzbekistan, the Defense Ministry said on Monday. The evacuees would then be picked up by civilian aircraft.
According to reports in the German press, Chancellor Angela Merkel told her party leadership on Monday that up to 10,000 people may be evacuated, including 2,500 Afghans who had been working with Germany and a further 2,000 that included human rights activists and others who may be in danger.
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French Defense Minister Florence Parly said Monday that several transport planes have been sent to the United Arab Emirates, where they will regroup before heading to Kabul for an evacuation mission.
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On Monday, France’s ambassador to Afghanistan, David Martinon, posted a photo on social media that showed staffers in a temporary embassy at Kabul’s airport. “The French Embassy is relocated and at work,” the ambassador wrote.
NATO, the 30-member military alliance that ended its nearly two-decade military operations in Afghanistan this summer, maintains a diplomatic presence in the country and is helping maintain the airport, said Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
NATO officials are involved in the airport contract work involving logistics and servicing of aircraft, said a European official. But like many Western missions, it is unclear how much longer the alliance will keep a presence.
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“Everything depends on the security of the airport. If it gets much worse, the ambassadors and the rest of their staff will get out,” said another European official familiar with the situation.
As the Taliban advanced across the country over recent weeks, following the exit of U.S. troops, some countries had issued guidance for their citizens to leave the country as soon as possible.
India had closed the last of its consulates outside of Kabul last week as the Taliban seized regional capitals. Australia shut down its embassy in May, citing security concerns.
Many Western governments, including the United States, had began to accelerate programs to relocate Afghans who had interpreted for foreign troops and others who might be at risk of reprisal. But the speed of the Taliban’s advance on Kabul took nearly everyone by surprise, and by Sunday even the best-laid plans began to look far too slow.
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After Australia sent 250 defense personnel to help Afghans seeking to leave the country, a former Australian defense chief said that the government had waited too long to get people out.
“I have read a litany of reasons why this was going to take weeks, months and years and people were having to be processed. Now we find the very ugly truth that we’ve just left it far too late,” Chris Barrie told ABC News.
Images of the U.S. evacuating military dogs, taken on Sunday by a photographer with Stars and Stripes and shared on social media, also drew criticism from those who said the seats on the plane could have gone to eligible Afghans.
Taliban officials have said that foreigners will not be in danger after they assume control. “We assure all embassies, diplomatic missions, institutions and residences of foreign nationals in Kabul that there is no danger to them,” Mohammad Naeem, the official spokesman for the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, wrote on Twitter.
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But after two decades of often brutal conflict, few are sure what to expect from a group known for its violent punishments and severe restrictions on women’s rights.
The last time the Taliban held control of Afghanistan, 10 Iranian diplomats and one journalist were killed during a siege at the consulate in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, leading to tensions between Kabul and Tehran.
Few foreign diplomats lived in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, when the Taliban first created its “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the only countries to diplomatically recognize the Islamist group.
Though Western nations are closing their embassies twenty years later, the Taliban may not be as diplomatically isolated. Both Russia and China have issued statements suggesting they would be willing to engage with the group. Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, has said his country’s embassy will continue operations.
Russia’s embassy, a large facility that reopened in 2007 and is located outside the Green Zone on Darulaman Road near Afghanistan’s parliament building, will remain. “We will keep working here calmly and as usual,” Ambassador Dmitry Zhernov told state television channel Rossiya-1.
Loveday Morris in Berlin, Rick Noack in Paris and Jennifer Hassan in London contributed to this report.