U.S. Asks Taliban to Spare Its Embassy in Coming Fight for Kabul

By Lara Jakes
Aug. 12, 2021

WASHINGTON — American negotiators are trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the U.S. Embassy in Kabul if the extremist group takes over the country’s government and ever wants to receive foreign aid, three American officials said.

The effort, led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American envoy in talks with the Taliban, seeks to stave off a full evacuation of the embassy as they rapidly seize cities across Afghanistan. On Thursday, the State Department announced it was sending home an unspecified number of the 1,400 Americans stationed at the embassy and drawing down to what the agency’s spokesman, Ned Price, described as a “core diplomatic presence” in Kabul.

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Mr. Price said the heightened pace of the Taliban’s rout, leading to increased violence and instability across Afghanistan, was of “grave concern.”

“So given the situation on the ground, this is a prudent step,” he 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 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 wanted to avoid: the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Americans stationed at the U.S. Embassy were evacuated from a rooftop by helicopter.

The fears underscore what was unfathomable just a few years ago, when thousands of American forces were in Afghanistan and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul hosted one of the largest diplomatic staffs in the world.

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Ronald E. Neumann, who was the American ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, described a push and pull between the Pentagon and the State Department in similar situations, given the military’s responsibility for carrying out evacuations and diplomats’ duty to maintain American assistance and influence even in danger zones.

“If the military goes too early, it may be unnecessary, and it may cost you a lot politically,” said Mr. Neumann, who is now the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington. “If the diplomats wait too late, it looks like Saigon off the roof or the departure from Mogadishu after everything was already lost, and it puts the military people at risk. So there’s no guaranteed right side.”

Another senior U.S. official expressed alarm this week at the fall of the provincial capitals across Afghanistan, and said that if other cities follow, particularly Mazar-i-Sharif, the only major northern city still under government control, the situation could disintegrate quickly.

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