Biden: U.S. forces could stay in Afghanistan past Aug. 31 deadline

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Sunday left open the possibility of keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan beyond an Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline, and enlisted the aid of major American airline carriers to help relocate thousands of evacuees already airlifted out of Kabul.

Biden, speaking from the White House after a meeting with his national security team, said the United States had evacuated nearly 11,000 Americans and Afghan refugees over a 30-hour-period this weekend, and had taken steps to increase access to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where Taliban forces have largely blocked access to crowds of civilians looking to flee the country.

"Let me be clear, the evacuation of thousands of people from Kabul is going to be hard and painful, no matter when it started, when we began," Biden said a week after the Afghan government collapsed to the Taliban, prompting throngs of panicked Afghans to rush to the airport seeking refuge.

Biden, who initially set an Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw U.S. forces from the country, said discussions were underway about extending the deadline to ensure all Americans are evacuated from the country.

"There are discussions going on among us and the military about extending," Biden said, responding to a question about the deadline. "Our hope is we will not have to extend, but there are going to be discussions I suspect on how far along we are in the process."

Biden's speech came hours after the Pentagon activated a seldom-used program — the Civilian Reserve Air Fleet — to compel several major U.S. airline companies to assist in the evacuation effort.

Biden said the commercial planes will not fly directly into Afghanistan, but instead will help speed up the relocation of Americans and Afghan civilians that had been flown from Kabul to secondary processing sites in the Middle East and Europe.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby in a statement said the United States will enlist the support of 18 commercial airplanes — three each from American Airlines, Atlas Air, Delta Air Lines and Omni Air; two from Hawaiian Airlines; and four from United Airlines.

"The Department does not anticipate a major impact to commercial flights from this activation," Kirby said.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told ABC’s "This Week" that military leaders are going to "continue to look at different ways ... and creative ways" to help get Americans and those Afghans who worked alongside the United States, into the airport in Kabul.

"There's no such thing as an absolute in this kind of environment, as you would imagine," Austin said when pressed on reports of the Taliban blocking entry even to those wielding U.S. passports and special U.S. visas. "There have been incidents of people having some tough encounters with [the] Taliban. As we learn about those incidents, we certainly go back and engage the Taliban leadership and press home to them that our expectation is that they allow our people with the appropriate credentials to get through the checkpoints."

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, appearing on CNN’s "State of the Union" acknowledged Americans in Afghanistan looking to escape also face threats from the Islamic State terrorist group.

"The threat is real. It is acute. It is persistent. And it is something that we are focused on with every tool in our arsenal," Sullivan said.

Intelligence and military officials, he said, were "placing paramount priority on stopping or disrupting" threats from the Islamic State as thousands of people continue to crowd the perimeter of the airport looking for entry. Sullivan said he believed the United States currently had sufficient military personnel at the airport, but did not rule out the possible need for more.

"Our commanders on the ground have a wide variety of capabilities that they are using to defend the airfield against a potential terrorist attack," Sullivan said. "We are working hard with our intelligence community to try to isolate and determine where an attack might come from."

There have been approximately 25,100 personnel evacuated from Afghanistan since Aug 14, but when pressed on how many more individuals still needed to be evacuated, Sullivan did not provide an exact figure.

"We have been in contact with a few thousand Americans, and we are working hard to make arrangements, make plans with each of those people and each of their families to get them safely to the airport and get them out," Sullivan said.

On the Sunday morning political talk show circuit, Biden continued to face deep criticism for his handling of the evacuation effort.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), a U.S. Air Force veteran who served in Afghanistan, told CNN’s "State of the Union" the execution of the U.S. military withdrawal has been "disastrous." He raised concerns about the United States’ ability to recruit local allies in future conflicts, given the current chaos surrounding the evacuation of Afghans who worked with American forces and organizations.

"There's nobody that really doubts we're never going to be in a war again," Kinzger said. "If we fail to follow through on our commitment to these Afghans, that's going to put our serious national security at risk."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asked about the slow pace of the U.S. State Department’s processing of special immigrant visas, partly blamed the Trump administration, saying it had delayed processing applications of thousands of Afghan interpreters and workers before Biden took office in January.

"We inherited a program that was in a dead stall," Blinken said on "Fox News Sunday." "No interviews had been done when we came into office for visas for these folks going back to March 2020. Now largely, that was due to COVID. We restarted the interview process. The president issued an executive order his second week in office to look at the program to see how we could make it work better. We surged resources to the program, assigned more personnel in Afghanistan, in Washington, to make this work. We went from about a hundred visas a week back in March to 800 in July."

Blinken said the Biden administration initially believed "we would have time" to continue processing the visa applications, because "we believed that the government ... was not going to collapse, the military was not about to fade away when it did."