Afghanistan live news: UK defence secretary says it is ‘unlikely’ evacuation of Kabul will be extended

Prominent Afghan women’s rights activist Zarifa Ghafari has arrived in Germany with her family.

Ghafari reached Cologne/Bonn airport late on Monday after fleeing Afghanistan to Pakistan last week, the AP news agency reports.

In 2018, Ghafari became the mayor of the Afghan town of Maidan Shahr at the age of 26 and has survived at least six assassination attempts.

The UK defence secretary Ben Wallace has said the UK trying to secure the airport after the US withdrawal is not a solution.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s not about effectively whether I could fly in thousands of troops and secure the airport. Yes, I could do that, I could probably secure the airport for a few months, or maybe a year or two.

“But for what purpose? For them to be shot at, attacked, people not to get to the airport and to trigger just a permanent fight? I don’t think that is a solution.”

Norway’s foreign minister Ine Eriksen Soreide has called for the withdrawal deadline to be extended beyond 31 August, adding that Norway will continue evacuations as long as Kabul airport remains open.

“One of the main concerns is that the airport will be closed,” Eriksen Soreide told Norwegian broadcaster TV2 on Tuesday morning. “The civilian part is closed now, so we are completely dependent on the US military operation being maintained in order to be able to evacuate.”

She said there was “no guarantee” all Norwegian citizens would be evacuated – words which were echoed by the Swedish foreign minister Ann Linde.

Eriksen Soreide’s comments came as a plane with 157 people who had been evacuated from Afghanistan landed in Oslo. Norway has so far evacuated 374 people from Afghanistan.

In the UK, Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, who served in Afghanistan, has said extending the 31 August deadline would depend on Taliban cooperation as well as a US agreement.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme: “I support the prime minister completely on this, but let’s recognise what we’re asking – we’re not just asking the Americans, although clearly they’ll have a major role, we’re actually asking the Taliban, and that’s a really difficult thing, because bluntly, they’re not exactly trustworthy.”

Tugendhat said the government could ask the US to stand with them, adding that if the Americans decide not to the UK won’t be able to secure the airfield. He said that many families are struggling to get through the gate and “a day, maybe two days longer, would help just a few more”.

Hundreds of Afghan refugees living in Indonesia, mostly members of the Hazara ethnic minority, held a rally on Tuesday calling for resettlement in third countries following the Taliban’s lightning power grab.

Around half of the 13,400 refugees living in Indonesia are Afghans, according to UN figures from April. Indonesia is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention of 1951 and its 1967 Protocol, and doesn’t allow asylum seekers to work or have access to public services.

The Associated Press reports that protesters gathered outside the UN refugee agency’s office Jakarta, with many saying they’re terrified for their families back home.

Banners at the rally read “Afghanistan is not safe” and “Resettle Afghan refugees from Indonesia”.

The UK shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, has called on Boris Johnson to “step up” and for world leaders to agree to a withdrawal plan as the 31 August deadline looms.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Nandy said there is not much more soldiers and other staff on the ground can do, but said there is “certainly” more that the politicians can do to support them.

She told BBC Breakfast: “They need help sorting through those cases, they need politicians to step up, most of all today, and agree a plan about how we’re going to get people out, extend the airbridge, but also support to those countries in the region like Pakistan who are seeing huge numbers of people crossing the border at the moment.

“To keep those borders open we need the world’s wealthiest countries to step up and say, ‘We will support you, this will not be your problem alone when this refugee crisis is over’.”

She called on Boris Johnson to “step up after years of cutting aid, of stepping back from the world, of trashing our alliances”.

Amrullah Saleh, the vice president of Afghanistan’s fallen government, has said the country rejects dictatorship.

Speaking to India TV, Saleh said Afghanistan rejected “power by force”.

He said: “Don’t want Afghanistan to become Talibanistan, that will not happen, that is what the Taliban want. We prefer negotiations, but it should be meaningful. We reject of the emirate of the Taliban, we reject dictatorship, and we reject power by force.

“We are not seeking positions, personal favours, but we want the Afghan people to have a chance to determine the character of their state. We don’t want the individual identities of the Afghan people to be shattered.”

That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. Thanks for following along – and stay tuned for the latest with my colleague Clea Skopeliti.

The G7 is due to meet today. When the leaders last met two months ago, they put Afghanistan as number 57 out of 70 points in their final 25-page communique – behind Ukraine, Belarus and Ethiopia, AP reports.

California Democrat Rep Adam Schiff, chairman of the House intelligence committee, told reporters after a committee briefing Monday on the Afghanistan withdrawal “it was hard for me to imagine” wrapping up the airlifts by the end of the month.

He also said it was clear “there were any number of warnings” to the administration “of a very rapid takeover” by the Taliban.

After more than a week of evacuations plagued by major obstacles, including Taliban forces and crushing crowds that are making approaching the airport difficult and dangerous, the number of people flown out met – and exceeded – US projections for the first time, AP reports. The count was more than twice the 3,900 flown out in the previous 24 hours on US military planes.

Army General Stephen Lyons, head of US Transportation Command, which manages the military aircraft that are executing the Kabul airlift, told a Pentagon news conference that more than 200 planes are involved, including aerial refuelling planes, and that arriving planes are spending less than an hour on the tarmac at Kabul before loading and taking off. He said the nonstop mission is taking a toll on aircrews.

“They’re tired,” Lyons said of the crews. “They’re probably exhausted in some cases.”

The US military pulled off its biggest day of evacuation flights out of Afghanistan by far on Monday, but deadly violence that has blocked many desperate evacuees from entering Kabul’s airport persisted, and the Taliban signalled they might soon seek to shut down the airlifts.

AP: Twenty-eight US military flights ferried about 10,400 people to safety out of Taliban-held Afghanistan over 24 hours that ended early Monday morning, and 15 C-17 flights over the next 12 hours brought out another 6,660, White House officials said.

The chief Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said the faster pace of evacuation was due in part to coordination with Taliban commanders on getting evacuees into the airport.

“Thus far, and going forward, it does require constant coordination and deconfliction with the Taliban,” Kirby said.

“What we’ve seen is, this deconfliction has worked well in terms of allowing access and flow as well as reducing the overall size of the crowds just outside the airport.”

With access still difficult, the US military went beyond the airport to carry out another helicopter retrieval of Americans. US officials said a military helicopter picked up 16 American citizens Monday and brought them onto the airfield for evacuation.

This was at least the second such rescue mission beyond the airport; Kirby said that last Thursday, three Army helicopters picked up 169 Americans near a hotel just beyond the airport gate and flew them onto the airfield.