CIA director William Burns in secret talks with Taliban

The CIA director is reported to have held talks in Kabul with the Taliban as US troops ramp up efforts to airlift people out of the city.

CIA director William Burns was reportedly in Kabul on Monday. Picture: AFP.

The director of the CIA is reported to have held secret talks in Kabul with a co-founder of the Taliban as American troops ramp up ­efforts to airlift thousands of people out of the city.

The meeting of CIA boss William Burns and Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is said to have taken place on Monday after the Taliban said it would not allow the US to extend next week’s deadline for a complete withdrawal.

Mr Burns is one of US President Joe Biden’s most experienced diplomats. Baradar, who headed the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, is one of the top leaders in the regime.

A spokesman for the CIA would not confirm the meeting, first reported by The Washington Post, saying the agency “never discusses the director’s travels”.

The Post said it was likely the talks centred on the August 31 deadline to pull out US forces.

Mr Biden is under increasing pressure to go beyond the deadline, with Britain to lobby at a virtual G7 summit on Tuesday night for a longer presence.

More than 10,000 people were evacuated from Hamid Karzai International Airport in the 12 hours until 3pm Monday (8.30pm AEST), a White House official said. The number of people relocated from Afghanistan on US flights since July is now 53,000, with the vast majority of those since the intense airlift operations started on August 14 as the Taliban moved into Kabul.

The first refugees arrived on American soil on Tuesday after being flown from US bases in the Middle East and Europe on commercial airliners called up for the evacuation. They had been evacuated from Kabul on C-17 Globemaster military transports

Shima, 30, choked up as she displayed a picture on her mobile phone of her two daughters, aged six and 10. “My girls are in Afghanistan and I am in America,” she said after arriving with her ­husband at Dulles International Airport in Virginia.

Romal Haiderzada, 27, was also among a group of Afghans who were flown to the US for resettlement. “Many people came from Afghanistan because we had worked with US soldiers in Bagram,” said Haiderzada, who received a special immigrant visa, in a reference to a former US military base north of Kabul.

“That’s why we feel unsafe,” he said. “We just came here.”

He had spent time at US bases in Qatar and Germany before ­finally being flown to the US.

In Kabul, crowds continued to mass outside the airport, with ­Afghans terrified of facing life under the Taliban. Many fear a repeat of the brutal interpretation of sharia law the Taliban implemented when first in power from 1996 to 2001, or retribution for working with the US-backed government over the past two decades.

“The Taliban are the same as they were 20 years ago,” Nilofar Bayat, a women’s rights activist and former captain of Afghanistan’s wheelchair basketball team, said after fleeing and arriving in Spain. “If you see Afghanistan now, it’s all men – there are no women because they don’t accept women as part of society.”

The Taliban, which ended two decades of war with an astonishingly swift rout of government forces, had been publicly tolerant of the evacuation effort but on Monday described next week’s cut-off date as a “red line”.

“If the US or UK were to seek additional time to continue evacuations — the answer is no... there would be consequences,” spokesman Suhail Shaheen told Sky News. He said any foreign military presence beyond the agreed ­deadline would be “extending ­occupation”.

The Taliban achieved its victory thanks to Mr Biden pulling out nearly all US troops from ­Afghanistan, following through on a deal struck with the Taliban by Donald Trump. However, Mr Biden was forced to redeploy thousands of troops after the fall of Kabul to oversee the airlift.

Mr Biden and his top aides have repeatedly insisted they are aiming to stick to their August 31 ­deadline.

European leaders are calling for more time. British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Prime Minister Boris Johnson would raise the issue at the G7 virtual summit. Germany also said it was in talks with NATO allies and the Taliban to keep Kabul’s airport open for evacuations beyond Aug­ust 31, and France said “additional time is needed to complete ongoing operations”.

AFP