Marines Prepare for Possible Evacuation of Americans in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Pentagon is moving thousands of Marines into position for a possible evacuation of the American Embassy and U.S. citizens in Kabul as the Biden administration braces for a possible collapse of the Afghan government within 30 days, administration and military officials said.

The sharply deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, as the Taliban rapidly advance across the north and Afghan security forces battle to defend ever shrinking territory in the south and west, has forced the Defense Department to accelerate plans to get Americans out of the country. Officials say any evacuation will involve a robust use of American military force to move people to Hamid Karzai International Airport to waiting military transport planes and to protect them en route.

American negotiators are also trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the embassy if they overrun the capital, two American officials said.

On Thursday, the embassy sent the latest in a series of alarming alerts, urging Americans to “leave Afghanistan immediately using available commercial flight options.”

The 30-day estimate is one scenario and administration and military officials insist that the fall of Kabul might still be prevented if Afghan security forces can muster the resolve to put up more resistance. But while Afghan commandos have managed to continue fighting in some areas, they have largely folded in a number of northern provincial capitals.

The Taliban seized the strategic city of Ghazni, about 90 miles south of Kabul, on Thursday, putting the group in a better position to attack Kabul after its recent string of victories in the north.

And as Ghazni fell, Taliban fighters broke through multiple front lines in Kandahar, pushing deep into the city. As Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar is historically and strategically important. The Taliban, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, began their insurgency there in the 1990s.

Herat, a city in western Afghanistan near the Iranian border, was also in an increasingly dangerous position as Taliban fighters flooded in.

Another senior U.S. official described the mood in the White House as a combination of alarm and resignation — at the rapid pace of the Taliban offensive and the collapse of Afghan national forces, and over how the situation could continue to worsen. There has been a constant stream of video teleconference calls every day this week, the official said.

Three contingents of Marines are preparing for the possible evacuation of the American Embassy, officials said. A Marine battalion of several hundred is already on the embassy grounds, responsible for evacuating the embassy, which has 4,000 employees, including 1,400 Americans, officials said.

In addition, the Pentagon is moving a Marine expeditionary unit, with more than 2,000 Marines, into position closer to the air route over western Pakistan, known as the “boulevard,” where it can dispatch its forces into Afghanistan as a rapid response team that would be able to begin an embassy evacuation within a day of orders, officials said. And as a contingency plan in case any embassy evacuation turns into a fight with the Taliban, Defense Department officials have tasked thousands of Marines to begin a training exercise that can, if necessary, quickly be turned into an evacuation deployment, the officials said. The Marines in the exercise have been told that they may need to be ready to deploy next week within 96 hours, officials said.

Asked during a news conference on Wednesday whether the Pentagon was speeding up any evacuation of people from the embassy, a spokesman for the Defense Department, John F. Kirby, demurred.

“We’re focused on the security situation that we face now, which again we’ve acknowledged is deteriorating,” he said. “We are certainly mindful of the advances that the Taliban have made in terms of taking over yet an increased number of provincial capitals.”

In the Biden administration’s aspirational plan for Afghanistan, none of this was supposed to happen — at least not so quickly. President Biden announced in April that American troops would withdraw from the country by Sept. 11; he later moved that date up to Aug. 31, and most of the troops have left. The president insisted that the Afghan government and military, with financial support from the United States, would be responsible for defending the country’s urban areas from the Taliban.

But since the announcement, the Taliban have rolled across city after city, despite having only around 75,000 fighters compared with the American-trained Afghan security forces’ 300,000 troops. That dichotomy has caused frustration in the Pentagon and among American officials, who have repeatedly said that the Afghan troops, if their backs were to the wall, would rally to defeat the Taliban.

“They have a lot of advantages that the Taliban don’t have,” Mr. Kirby said, referring to Afghanistan’s national security forces. “Taliban doesn’t have an air force, Taliban doesn’t own airspace. They have a lot of advantages. Now, they have to use those advantages.”

But President Ashraf Ghani’s administration has failed to carry out any kind of strategy to defend what cities that remain or retake them despite saying he would do so. Pro-government militia forces, championed by Afghan officials and reminiscent of the bloody civil war of the 1990s, have consistently been unable to push the Taliban back.

Mr. Ghani on Wednesday replaced the country’s army chief and appointed a new commander of the military’s commando units, in what has amounted to one of his most public moves yet to contend with the Taliban offensive, which has taken more than half of Afghanistan’s roughly 400 districts.

The American military, for its part, is still supporting, to some degree, Afghanistan’s government forces with airstrikes. But those strikes have largely been limited to the southern part of the country, around Kandahar. That is because of logistics: Now that the United States has withdrawn from Bagram base in the north, and has hauled away its warplanes and their massive support systems, it is harder to reach the north. Such strikes could require aerial refueling and would have other logistical hurdles that make them harder to conduct.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American envoy in talks with the Taliban, is leading the diplomatic effort for assurances from the Taliban that they won’t attack the embassy. Two officials confirmed his efforts, which have not been previously reported, on condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate negotiations.

Mr. Khalilzad is hoping to convince Taliban leaders that the embassy must remain open, and secure, if the group hopes to receive American financial aid and other assistance as part of a future Afghan government. The Taliban leadership has said it wants to be seen as a legitimate steward of the country, and is seeking relations with other global powers, including Russia and China, in part to receive economic support.

The State Department’s spokesman, Ned Price, declined to comment on Wednesday, but said funding would be conditioned on whether future Afghan governments would “have any semblance of durability.”

“Legitimacy bestows, and essentially is the ticket, to the levels of international assistance, humanitarian assistance for the Afghan people,” Mr. Price said.

Five current and former officials described the mood inside the embassy as increasingly tense and worried, and diplomats at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington noted a sense of tangible depression at the specter of closing it, nearly 20 years after U.S. Marines reclaimed the burned-out building in December 2001.

Several people gloomily revived a comparison that all want to avoid: the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Americans were evacuated from the embassy from a rooftop by helicopter.

“I don’t think people are yet at the point where they would say we need to get out the door, but they will be looking at the door a lot more often,” said Ronald E. Neumann, who was the American ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 and is now the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff reported from Kabul, and Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes and Eric Schmitt from Washington.