President Biden received questions from reporters Friday for the first time since Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, outside of an interview on Wednesday on ABC News, promising that the U.S. will get any American home that wants to return home. The president’s address comes as tens of thousands of American citizens, legal residents and their families and vulnerable Afghans struggle to flee the country.
The president began his speech by announcing what the U.S. has done so far: 18,000 people have been evacuated in recent weeks and 5,700 people in the last 24 hours alone. Biden said the U.S. will do “everything, everything possible” to evacuate as many Afghans as the U.S. has helped. The Pentagon has said it will be possible to fly 5,000 to 9,000 a day outside of Kabul, but that depends on multiple factors.
“But make it clear. Any American who wants to come home, we’ll take him home,” Biden told reporters in the East Room of the White House.
The president did not explicitly commit to extending the mission to Afghanistan beyond Aug. 31, saying he believes the United States can complete the mission by then, “but we will make that judgment as we move forward.”
“There will be plenty of time to criticize and guess when this operation is over,” Biden said, adding that now is not the time for that.
However, the president did not directly answer whether the U.S. will send troops to help Americans trying to get to Kabul airport, saying his administration is unaware of U.S. citizens struggling to get past the points. control. He said the US has an “agreement” with the Taliban to let the Americans through. CBS News has found cases of American citizens struggling to get to the airport.
“Don’t be fooled,” the president said. “This evacuation mission is dangerous and involves risks for our armed forces and is being carried out in difficult circumstances. I cannot promise what the end result will be, which will be without risk or loss. But as commander in no, I can assure you that I will mobilize all the necessary resources “.
On Friday, the U.S. military was forced to do so stops its evacuation flights from Kabul because the current processing plant in Qatar reached its capacity. The United States hopes to open a new flight option to Bahrain soon. Biden acknowledged the “few hours” pause, attributing it to ensuring that “we can prosecute evacuees arriving at transit points.” He added: “Our commander in Kabul has already given the order to resume the outbound flights.”
The State Department and the Pentagon have not revealed how many Americans remained in Afghanistan when the Taliban took control of the country, but earlier this week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki , estimated that there were about 11,000 self-identified Americans.
In Doha, Qatar, where evacuees are being prosecuted, sources described the situation at the facility as hot, increasingly tense and as a “developing humanitarian crisis.”
During an interview earlier this week with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, the president defended his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and suggested that last week’s apparent chaos was inevitable.
“No, I think it couldn’t have been handled in a way that we’ll look back and look at, but the idea that somehow there’s a way to have come out without chaos occurs, you don’t know how it goes that, ”the president he told Stephanopoulos.
He also said during the interview that U.S. troops could remain in Afghanistan more than August 31 if necessary to remove the Americans from the country, but stressed that the goal is to do so by the end of August 31st.
The Pentagon said this week that it is working with the Taliban to ensure the safe passage of Americans to the airport, admitting that the military could not leave and extract a large number of people who could not reach the airport themselves or that they are afraid to do so. .
“I don’t have the capacity to go out and extend operations currently in Kabul,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday.
The president was scheduled to leave for his home in Wilmington, Delaware, on Friday afternoon after his speech, but the White House announced at noon that his schedule had changed and instead said he would stay in Washington, DC, Friday night.
– CBS News correspondent Christina Ruffini contributed to the reports.