WASHINGTON — The U.S. has completed efforts to evacuate its remaining civilians and troops from Afghanistan, effectively ending the longest war in American history, the Pentagon said Monday.
“I’m here to announce the completion of our mission in Afghanistan,” Marine Corps General Kenneth McKenzie told reporters in a virtual briefing. “The last C-17 took off at 3:29 pm.”
The departure of the last U.S. plane from Afghanistan capped a bloody and chaotic end to the conflict. In the war’s final weeks, fighting and terror attacks amid the scramble to evacuate thousands of Americans and Afghans left 13 service members and hundreds of civilians dead. The U.S. is not expected to have any diplomatic or military presence in the country after this point, officials said.
President Joe Biden has faced some of the harshest criticism of his presidency from both Republicans and Democrats since the Taliban took control of the country on Aug. 15. But he has stood behind his decision to pull all U.S. troops out of the country by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, saying it was no longer in America’s interest to keep troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
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Biden was meeting with advisors in the Oval Office when an aide passed a note to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan alerting him that the last military plane had safely left Kabul and Sullivan relayed the news to the president, a White House official said.
As the U.S. handed the country over to the very group that they began fighting 20 years earlier, Biden has no second thoughts, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.
“The president stands by his decision to bring our men and women home from Afghanistan,” Psaki said.
In a statement Monday evening Biden thanked the service members who aided in the evacuation and said he would make further remarks Tuesday.
“The past 17 days have seen our troops execute the largest airlift in US history, evacuating over 120,000 US citizens, citizens of our allies, and Afghan allies of the United States,” Biden said. They have done it with unmatched courage, professionalism, and resolve. Now, our 20-year military presence in Afghanistan has ended.”
Biden defended his decision to end the evacuation operation saying that it was the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs and of all of the commanders on the ground.
“Their view was that ending our military mission was the best way to protect the lives of our troops, and secure the prospects of civilian departures for those who want to leave Afghanistan in the weeks and months ahead,” Biden said in the statement.
McKenzie said more than 6,000 Americans were evacuated representing the “vast majority of those who wanted to leave at this time.” He said the number of remaining Americans is in the “very low hundreds.”
The administration remains committed to getting all Americans and eligible Afghans who want to leave out of the country beyond the Aug. 31 deadline, shifting from a military to a diplomatic operation led by the State Department, McKenzie said.
“There’s a lot of heartbreak associated with this departure. We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out,” said McKenzie, who served in Afghanistan along with his son. “But I think if we’d stayed another 10 days really, we wouldn’t have gotten everybody out that we wanted to get out and there still would have been people who would have been disappointed. It’s a tough situation.”
A White House official said Monday that since the Taliban took control of Kabul in mid-August, the U.S. had evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of approximately 116,700 people. Since the end of July, the U.S. has relocated approximately 122,300 people, the official said.
The evacuation continued “uninterrupted” Monday, the White House said, despite a barrage of rockets that had been fired toward Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. About 1,500 Afghans were evacuated from the country over the last 24 hours and every service member is now out of the country, McKenzie said.
A State Department memo obtained by NBC News Sunday said that the agency had begun evacuating remaining diplomatic workers on two planes carrying U.S. government employees, and secured all locally employed U.S. Embassy staff members, processing the last three buses and evacuating 2,800 employees and family members, according to the cable.
On Sunday, about 250 Americans remained in Afghanistan and were seeking to leave the country, according to a State Department spokesperson, who said that assistance was being coordinated “around the clock for this group.” The official said that those Americans might already be at the airport in Kabul or “in the process of being guided there, and all have information on how to reach us.”
The State Department was also in touch Sunday with about 280 additional people who identified themselves as Americans but were either undecided about leaving Afghanistan or said that they did not intend to leave.
Nearly 2,500 service members and 3,800 U.S. contractors were killed over the nearly 20-year war.
Peter Alexander contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
