WASHINGTON — President Biden defended his decision to withdraw American troops on Tuesday in a major speech at the White House.

"I believe this is the right decision, a wise decision and the best decision for America," Biden said.

THOSE HELPED AND THOSE WHO WEREN'T

Over 120,000 people were evacuated, including around 6,000 Americans over the last several weeks.

However, more than 100 Americans were left behind as well as thousands of Afghans who fear retribution from the Taliban.

Millions of Afghan citizens are at economic risk in the coming weeks as the United Nations warns of a "collapsing" supply chain.

LEADERSHIP GOING FORWARD

So who will help those left behind? It will not be the U.S. military.

However, the State Department has been charged with working with the Taliban in a limited capacity.

Taliban officials have promised to cooperate and assist Americans and Afghan nationals with proper travel documents.

"August 31st is not a cliff," Jake Sullivan, President Biden's national security adviser, told CNN on Sunday.

Sullivan stressed the U.S. had leverage over the Taliban to continue limited evacuation efforts.

However, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday, the American embassy in Kabul will not be reopened.

Diplomatic negotiations will take place in Doha, Qatar where American diplomats focused on Afghanistan will take up residence.

OTHER COUNTRIES MOVING-IN

As a result of the U.S. leaving Afghanistan, other countries and organizations are poised to take a more prominent role in Afghanistan.

Leaders in China and Russia have released statements suggesting a willingness to work with the Taliban.

Pakistan has worked with the World Health Organization in the last several days to fly-in urgently needed medical supplies to Kabul.

That suggests a willingness by the Taliban to work with some international organizations.

Still, after 20 years of war, trusting the Taliban will take time for many U.S. officials.

Meanwhile, questions continue to swirl as to what life will be like in Afghanistan going forward.

The Taliban has already restricted bank withdrawals to $200 a week.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government has launched a mass COVID-19 vaccination site for arriving Afghans near Dulles International Airport, where thousands fleeing the Taliban are now arriving daily.

A senior administration official says the site was set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and already has begun administering vaccinations.

The Associated Press reports that the evacuees are being administered single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The evacuees are also tested upon arrival in the U.S. and quarantined if they test positive.

The official was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The site's opening comes after the White House said earlier this week that it was working to provide medically eligible evacuees with the shots.

A second mass vaccination site is expected to be launched in the coming days for evacuees who will be arriving at the Philadelphia International Airport.

The World Health Organization reports that as of Aug. 20, just 1.2 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine had been administered to the 40 million people in Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON —

Educated young women, former U.S. military translators and other Afghans most at-risk from the Taliban appealed to the Biden administration to get them on evacuation flights as the United States struggled to bring order to the continuing chaos at the Kabul airport.

President Joe Biden and his top officials said the U.S. was working to speed up the evacuation, but made no promises how long it would last or how many desperate people it would fly to safety “We don’t have the capability to go out and collect large numbers of people,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Wednesday, adding that evacuations would continue “until the clock runs out or we run out of capability.”

Afghans in danger because of their work with the U.S. military or U.S organizations, and Americans scrambling to get them out, also pleaded with Washington to cut the red tape that they say could strand thousands of vulnerable Afghans if U.S. forces withdraw as planned in the coming days.

“If we don’t sort this out, we’ll literally be condemning people to death,” said Marina Kielpinski LeGree, the American head of a nonprofit, Ascend. The organization's young Afghan female colleagues were in the mass of people waiting for flights at the airport in the wake of days of mayhem, tear gas and gunshots.

The U.S. has rushed in troops, transport planes and commanders to secure the airport, seek Taliban guarantees of safe passage, and ramp up an airlift capable of ferrying between 5,000 and 9,000 people a day.

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman described an all-out effort by U.S. officials to get Afghans and allies to safety. “This is an all-hands-on-deck effort and we’re aren’t going to let up,” Sherman said at a State Department news conference.

Taliban fighters and checkpoints ringed the airport — barriers for Afghans who fear that their past work with Westerners makes them prime targets of the insurgents. Afghans who made it past the Taliban reached Americans guarding the airport complex, and thrust documents at some of the 4,500 U.S. troops in temporary control.

One of the last windows of escape from Taliban threatens to close when Biden's planned pullout by Aug. 31 is complete.

“People are going to die,” said Air Force veteran Sam Lerman. He said he was working to help a former Afghan military contractor who received an email from the State Department telling him to go to the airport. But U.S. troops at the entry to the airport turned back the Afghan man Wednesday, telling him he lacked the right document, Lerman said.

Hundreds of Afghans who lacked any papers or promises of flights also congregated at the airport, adding to the chaos. It didn't help that many of the Taliban fighters were illiterate, and cannot read the documents.

Nearly 6,000 people had been evacuated by the U.S. military since Saturday, a White House official said Wednesday night. The turmoil has seen Afghans rush the tarmac. In one instance, some apparently fell to their death while clinging to a departing American C-17 transport plane.

Hoping to secure seats on an airlift are American citizens and other foreigners, Afghan allies of the Western forces, and women, journalists, activists and others most at risk from the fundamentalist Taliban.

The U.S. has declined to give estimates of how many U.S. citizens remain in Afghanistan and are in need of escape.

About 100,000 Afghans were seeking evacuation through a U.S. visa program meant to provide refuge to Afghans who had worked with Americans, as well as family members, said Rebecca Heller, head of the U.S.-based International Refugee Assistance Program. Her organization was among those pressing the United States to urgently step up visa processing.

Heller said an Afghan client told her of five Afghan translators killed by the Taliban in the past two days for their past work with Americans.

Heller played an appeal that she said a female Afghan client had recorded. The woman, whose name The Associated Press is withholding for her safety, has been waiting for three years for U.S. action on her visa application.

“The only hope in this moment I have is the U.S. government,” the Afghan woman said. “Please, U.S. government ... please stop promising. Please, start taking action. As immediately as you can."

The Pentagon said senior U.S. military officers, including Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, are talking to Taliban commanders about Taliban checkpoints and curfews that have limited the number of Americans and Afghans able to enter the airport.

The U.S. government sent emails in recent days telling some American citizens, green card holders and their families, and others to come to the airport, and to be prepared to wait.

Biden has defended his decision to end the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan that began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has rejected blame for the chaos that has ensued. Biden laid responsibility on Afghans themselves for the Taliban takeover and for the frantic scrambles to flee the country.

But refugee groups note years-long backlog of visa applications.

An operation to fly to the United States former Afghan translators and others whose visa processes were closest to completion had managed to bring in only about half of the 4,000 Afghans predicted before the Taliban takeover.

A separate visa program meant to fly out civil society members most at risk from the Taliban was handicapped from the start, partly by a U.S. requirement that Afghans travel outside Afghanistan to apply — a trip that the Taliban sweep made impossible for most.