Biden defended his decision to end the evacuation operation, saying it was the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 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.”
In an address Monday night, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the number of Americans still in the country who want to leave is “under 200, and likely closer to 100.” “We’re trying to determine exactly how many,” he said, and will continue to work to get them out of Afghanistan. “Our commitment to them has no deadline,” Blinken said.
McKenzie also said the administration remains committed to getting all Americans and eligible Afghans who want to leave out of the country beyond the deadline of Tuesday, shifting from a military to a diplomatic operation led by the State Department.
“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 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, the U.S. has evacuated and facilitated the evacuations of about 116,700 people. Since the end of last month, the U.S. has relocated about 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 over the previous 24 hours, and every service member is now out of the country, McKenzie said.
A State Department memo obtained by NBC News on Sunday said the agency had begun evacuating remaining diplomatic workers on two planes carrying U.S. government employees and had secured all locally employed U.S. Embassy staff members, processing the last three buses and evacuating 2,800 employees and family members.
About 250 Americans who remained in Afghanistan on Sunday were seeking to leave, said a State Department spokesperson, who said the assistance was being coordinated “around the clock for this group.” The official said 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.
Blinken said the departure of U.S. forces means “a new chapter of America’s engagement with Afghanistan has begun.” He said the State Department “suspended our diplomatic presence in Kabul, and transferred our operations to Doha, Qatar.”
“Going forward, any engagement with the Taliban-led government in Kabul will be driven by one thing only — our vital national interests,” Blinken said.
Nearly 2,500 service members and 3,800 U.S. contractors were killed over the nearly 20-year war.
Peter Alexander contributed.
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