Biden to Address Afghan Crisis as Desperation Builds at Kabul Airport

Biden to Address Afghan Crisis as Desperation Builds at Kabul Airport

President Biden will speak on Friday amid intense criticism of the evacuation effort. A 17-year-old boy was identified as one of the Afghans who fell from a U.S. military plane as it lifted off. Threats against Afghan journalists are growing. As the United States tries to ramp up its troubled evacuation in Afghanistan, President Biden is expected on Friday to address the furor over the sluggish process, stymied by mayhem in Kabul and delays in Washington, that threatens to strand thousands of Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban takeover. Mr. Biden, who is expected to speak at 1 p.m. in Washington, has defended the pullout from Afghanistan, while promising not to abandon Afghans who risked their lives by working for the U.S. government during the war. The United States has rushed troops and diplomatic reinforcements to the Kabul airport in recent days to speed up visa processing for Afghans. American commanders are negotiating daily with their Taliban counterparts — the former insurgents they battled for nearly two decades — to ensure that evacuees can reach the airport. But the reassurances from Washington belie the fear and futility on the ground. Thousands are waiting fearfully outside the airport gates, where Taliban soldiers have attacked people with sticks and rifle butts. As Afghans clutching travel documents camped outside amid Taliban checkpoints and tangles of concertina wire, anxious crowds were pressed up against blast walls, with women and children being hoisted into the arms of U.S. soldiers on the other side. Since sweeping into Kabul last weekend, the Taliban have moved swiftly to cement their control over Afghanistan, dispersing protests with force and hunting down opponents despite pledges of amnesty, according to witnesses and a security assessment prepared for the United Nations. The group’s unpredictability and history of brutality have set off a rush to escape, especially among Afghans who worked alongside U.S. and NATO forces. Two U.S. officials described growing impatience within the Biden administration over the State Department’s inability to process visas more quickly. The visa system had a backlog of 17,000 cases when Mr. Biden took office in January. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul was processing at least 100 people each week until June before a resurgence of the coronavirus in Afghanistan halted the operation. One of the officials also described the challenges faced by people who helped the United States in reaching the airport safely, given the masses of Afghans trying to evacuate and the Taliban checkpoints. On Thursday, John R. Bass, the former ambassador to Afghanistan, arrived in Kabul with a small group of diplomats to speed up the visa processing. Diplomats are also going to Qatar and Kuwait, where U.S. military bases will serve as way stations for refugees and repatriates before they are sent to another country. “This is an operation that will continue at as fast a clip as we can possibly manage,” said Ned Price, a State Department spokesman. He said American officials were continuously alerting Afghans who had been cleared to fly, including more than 800 on Wednesday night. About 5,200 U.S. troops are securing the airport under the command of Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, a former Navy SEAL who speaks to a Taliban counterpart outside the airport several times a day, said a Pentagon spokesman Troops are also deployed at entrances to the airport, where they assist consular officers in reviewing documents, he said. As of Thursday afternoon, the U.S. military had evacuated 7,000 Americans, Afghans and others since Saturday. The effort is well short of the 5,000 to 9,000 passengers a day that the military will be able to fly out once the evacuation is at full throttle, officials said. “There are tens of thousands of Americans and Afghans literally at the gate,” said Sunil Varghese, the policy director for the International Refugee Assistance Project. “This could have been completely avoided if evacuation was part of the military withdrawal.”