A photo of a missing child is displayed on wired wall at Kabul airport in this TV grab. Local children and women are among victims suffering from food and water shortages, near the airport crowded with Afghan and foreign people, with more than a dozen deaths reported already. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

As the United States and the Taliban both ruled out any extension of the date to evacuate US nationals and others from Kabul, the news was greeted with discord and dismay by many Group of Seven leaders. There is uncertainty about what happens when the deadline expires with thousands expected to be still left stranded near Kabul airport.

The G7 held a virtual summit on Aug 24 as the US and its allies scrambled to complete evacuations from Taliban-held Afghanistan before the Aug 31 evacuation deadline. The discontent among the “rich countries club” runs deep over the US’ hasty withdrawal from the Asian country and the resulting chaos.

G7’s “immediate priority” is to ensure the safe evacuation of their citizens and Afghans who “have assisted” the group’s “efforts over the past 20 years,” said a statement released after the summit, which was chaired by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Despite pressure from allies on US President Joe Biden during the summit to extend his deadline for the withdrawal of troops, he has decided to stick to the scheduled date. 

On the same day Biden told G7 leaders that the US aims to complete the evacuation from Kabul by Aug 31, while asking for contingency plans to adjust the timeline if necessary.

“He also made clear that with each day of operations on the ground, we have added risk to our troops with increasing threats from ISIS-K,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement, referring to the local affiliate of the Islamic State.

“And that completion of the mission by August 31 depends on continued coordination with the Taliban, including continued access for evacuees to the airport.”

The statement came as multiple US news outlets reported that the Central Intelligence Agency’s director, William Burns, held a secret meeting with Taliban’s senior leader Abdul Ghani Baradar on Aug 23 in Kabul, which likely covered the Aug 31 deadline issue.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid made it clear at a press conference on Aug 24 that the US should withdraw all troops and contractors before the Aug 31 deadline.

The spokesman also said Afghan citizens would not be allowed to leave the country through the US evacuation process after the deadline.

A day earlier, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen, in an interview with Sky News, said an extension beyond that date would not be acceptable.

When asked if the Taliban would agree to the US or the United Kingdom being given more time for evacuations, Shaheen said “no”.

“You can say it’s a red line. President Biden announced this agreement, that on the 31st of August they would withdraw all their military forces. So if they extend it, that means they are extending occupation, while there is no need for that … If they are intent on continuing the occupation, it will provoke a reaction,” he said.

Aug 31 is less than two weeks from the 20th anniversary of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks on the US, the initial reason for the US military action in Afghanistan.

Biden’s decision goes against the preference of some allied leaders, who wanted more time to complete the evacuation.

As the deadline for evacuation is only days away, James Heappey, junior minister for the armed forces at the British Ministry of Defense, warned that Britain will not be able to evacuate everyone it hopes to.

“The fact is we will get out as many as we possibly can, but we have been clear throughout that there is a hard reality that we won’t be able to get out everybody that we want to,” he said on Aug 23.

French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian told reporters on the same day that “additional time” was “necessary” to carry out the evacuation.

Kabul’s international airport, from which the evacuation flights arrive and leave, has witnessed chaotic scenes. Tens of thousands of people have flocked to the airport, which has seen sporadic outbreaks of violence.

Some Afghans clung to a departing US military transport plane on Aug 16, before plunging to their deaths. At least seven people died that day, and another seven died on Aug 22 in a stampede.

A firefight just outside the airport killed at least one Afghan soldier early on Aug 23. The activity around the airport included gunfire, and beatings by the Taliban, while some caught up in the desperate crowds were trampled.

In one scene captured on social media, a small girl was hoisted over the airport’s perimeter wall and handed to a US soldier.

Twenty-eight US military flights transported about 10,400 people out of Afghanistan over the 24 hours that ended in early morning of Aug 23, a White House official said.

The US says it has evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of about 37,000 people since Aug 14. The military says it has the capacity to fly between 5,000 and 9,000 people out per day.

At a press briefing in the White House on Aug 23, Psaki objected to a reporter’s characterization that Americans were “stranded” in Afghanistan.

“First of all, I think it’s irresponsible to say Americans are stranded. They are not,” Psaki replied. “We are committed to bringing Americans who want to come home, home. We are in touch with them via phone, via text, via email, via any way that we can possibly reach Americans to get them home if they want to return home.”

But the chaos and harrowing scenes in Kabul have attracted a torrent of criticism over the US’ hasty withdrawal.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Aug 21 blasted the US for an “imbecilic” decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

“The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary,” he said. “We didn’t need to do it. We chose to do it. We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’.”

“The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was driven not by a grand strategy but by politics,” Blair noted.

Norbert Roettgen, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in Germany’s lower parliament, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur on Aug 24 that “part of the disaster is that the US decided to withdraw unilaterally”.

Elliott Abrams, chairman of the Vandenberg Coalition (a network for foreign policy scholars) and former senior US State Department official, has called Biden’s execution of Afghan withdrawal a “disgraceful performance”.

“Why did he not understand that his decisions would create chaos?” Abrams said.

Meanwhile, the likely massive influx of Afghan refugees has reopened divisions in Europe, as not all Europeans are willing to roll out the welcome mat for vulnerable people from the war-torn country.

“France (had) already taken its part,” spokesperson for the far-right National Rally, Julien Odoul, said on France Inter, a major French public radio channel, on Aug 23, arguing that “the terrorists (have) taken advantage of the migratory highways to infiltrate and then hit us”.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in August that “Europe alone cannot shoulder the consequences” of the situation in Afghanistan, and warned against “significant irregular migratory flows”.

Many EU states are worried about another refugee crisis like the one they faced in 2015.

Claiming to be in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, the US-led military forces invaded Afghanistan. Since then, they have caused more than 30,000 civilian deaths, injured over 60,000 and resulted in about 11 million refugees.

Twenty years of a failed “war on terror” has taken its toll: thousands of lives and a chaotic Afghanistan with millions of civilians displaced and homeless.

The botched Afghan retreat is the latest sign that the American era is ending as America’s global plan lies in ruins, a British newspaper said.

“The stupidity and incompetence” displayed over the Afghan withdrawal have once again confirmed that the US elites “don’t understand the rest of the world, and aren’t fit to govern their own country, let alone the globe”, The Daily Telegraph stated in an opinion article in August.

“Blinded by a simplistic universalism, they no longer understand religion, tribalism, history, national differences or why countries want to govern themselves,” it said.

The US failure in Afghanistan shows that “full-on liberal imperialism inevitably backfires”, it noted.

“America’s blueprint” has failed everywhere, the article said, noting that Brexit has signaled the beginning of the end of America’s dystopian construct.

In the Middle East, every country or territory touched by America is in chaos, the article said, citing Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and other Gulf states.

Concurrent with the US’ failure everywhere in the world, its internal problems are “immense”, the article pointed out. “Its constitution is broken; it no longer has values to sell, neither capitalism nor democracy nor the American dream,” it wrote.

America does not want to know about the rest of the world, thus “the American Empire” is sure to be in terminal decline, the article said.

Paolo Gentiloni, the European commissioner for economy and also a former Italian prime minister, said on Aug 23 that the failure of US-led forces in Afghanistan showed that the set of liberal values held by the West is “not a unanimously shared model”.

Effie Pedaliu, a visiting fellow at the IDEAS foreign policy think tank of the London School of Economics and Political Science, said in an article published on the LSE website that comparisons between Saigon and Kabul are “false and misleading”. 

“In the 1960s and 1970s, it was American credibility that was at stake. Now, it is the trustworthiness, reliability and relevance of the western model of governance,” she said.

Xinhua contributed to the story.