Seth Jones, a former U.S. special operations adviser in Afghanistan, told CNBC that he does not believe the U.S. can remove the nearly 1,500 Americans still remaining in Afghanistan before the deadline set by the U.S. president Joe Biden on August 31st.
“No, I don’t think it’s possible to get them all out, I mean, the challenge is for the Taliban to control all major roads, control all major cities,” said Jones, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. . “So I think this will probably continue for a while, more along the lines of the US using clandestine forces to try to get others out.”
In the past 24 hours, Western forces have evacuated 19,000 people from Kabul on 90 flights of military cargo planes, a cadence of one departure flight every 39 minutes, according to the Pentagon.
The Biden administration has not provided the total number of Americans and Afghans it intends to evacuate in just six days.
The State Department has given 500 of the 1,500 Americans specific instructions on how to safely reach Hamid Karzai International Airport. The U.S. is still trying to contact the remaining 1,000, though the number it really wants to leave may be lower, according to the State Department.
Jones told “The News with Shepard Smith” that the presence of US forces has kept the number of ISIS-K, an affiliate of the terrorist group based in Afghanistan, low. Now, however, Jones said that without pressure from US forces the terrorist group will return.
“It can now resurface in eastern Afghanistan and parts of the north and has built cellular structures in several cities, so I think we will see a much more violent Afghanistan, including groups like ISIS-K,” Jones said. .
The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.