Newly empowered Taliban militants have informed the U.S. that they are prepared to provide safe passage for civilians attempting to flee Afghanistan through an airport in Kabul, the White House said Tuesday.
“We intend to hold them to that commitment,” national security advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters amid a barrage of questions about the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was plunged into chaos as the Islamist insurgents quickly ousted its Western-backed government.
Sullivan also said that the “chaotic” situation in the Afghan capital makes it premature to speculate about whether the Taliban could form a government that the U.S. would recognize.
As the Taliban moved into Kabul, thousands of Afghans rushed to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, swarming the tarmac and clinging to the fuselage of airplanes before they took off. Some people fell to their deaths as they desperately tried to escape the country by holding onto aircraft wheels.
Evacuation flights resumed at the airport Tuesday, and Sullivan said that the airfield has been secured.
The astonishing speed of the Taliban’s takeover, and of the former Afghan government’s collapse, surprised even the Biden administration, which has come under fire from critics across the political spectrum who say the disastrous situation is the result of a rush and bungled withdrawal.
Lawmakers of both parties, including Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez, D-N.J., have called for investigation into the administration’s attempt to remove all troops from Afghanistan after nearly two decades of war.
Some of Sullivan’s remarks in the contentious briefing echoed President Joe Biden’s rhetoric from a major speech a day earlier, when he defended the decision to pull America out of the country as the better of two bad options.
Biden in that address took responsibility for the move, saying “the buck stops with me” — though he also spoke at length about what he described as the lack of willingness by the U.S.-trained Afghan army to fight the Taliban.
Asked to clarify if Biden also took responsibility for the gut-wrenching scenes of panic and mayhem at the Kabul airport, Sullivan said the president owns every good decision and “every decision that doesn’t produce perfect outcomes” with respect to the withdrawal.
