US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that in the last 24 hours, about 8,000 people on about 60 flights were evacuated from Kabul airport in Afghanistan. "Since this effort began at the end of July, about 30,000 people, all told, on our military flights and on charter flights that we helped organize and get out of the airport," Blinken said in an interview on Fox network. He added "here's what we've seen over the last week at the airport. Crowds have massed at the gates outside the airport. It's an incredibly volatile situation, it's an incredibly fluid situation." He stressed, "It's very important to make sure to the best of our ability, because it's such a volatile situation, that we do something about the crowding at the gates of the airport, and that's exactly what we're doing." "First, the more we move people out of the airport who are already in, the more we alleviate what has been overcrowding inside the airport, the more we can get people inside the airport and reduce some of the crowding at the gates," he stressed. "But second and most important, we're in direct contact with Americans and others to help guide them to the airport, right place, right time, to get in more safely and effectively." He reiterated "there's going to be plenty of time to look back, to figure out who was saying what when, what should have happened differently, plenty of time for that." "Right now, I'm focused on one thing and one thing only and that's the mission to get people out of Afghanistan, to get our people out, to get our partners out, to do it as fast as we can, to do it as effectively as we can, to do it as safely as we can," he remarked. On the threat from Al-Qaida, Blinken said that Al-Qaida's "capacity to do what it did on 9/11, to attack us, to attack our partners, our allies, from Afghanistan, is vastly, vastly diminished." When asked if it was gone, the US top diplomat replied, "Are there Al-Qaida members and remnants in Afghanistan? Yes." Meanwhile, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin told ABC network "if you have an American passport and if you have the right credentials, the Taliban has been allowing people to pass safely through." He added, "There have been incidents of people having 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 appropriate credentials to get through the checkpoints." "We're going to continue to assess the situation and, again, work as hard as we can to get as many people out as possible," he affirmed. "As we approach that deadline (Aug. 31) we'll make a recommendation to the president." Blinken also defended the Biden administration's actions on the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program in the lead up to the fall of Kabul but acknowledged that those efforts were not the same as "a full-on evacuation." The top US diplomat on Sunday indicated that the administration thought it would have more time to execute on those efforts to relocate the Afghans and their families who worked alongside the US government. "Because we believed that the government was not about, was not going to collapse, the military was not about to fade away when it did, we believed that we could do this with, in a very expedited way, more resources, more effort, more people out, but that we would have time to do it effectively," he said on "Fox News Sunday." Advocates and bipartisan lawmakers had urged the administration for months to carry out an evacuation, arguing that it was the only way to ensure that SIV applicants were safe prior to the withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan. — Agencies
