The US does not currently have the capability to evacuate large numbers of Americans who are outside Kabul – and troops are having to negotiate with the Taliban to allow people passage to the airport, the US defence secretary has said.

Speaking from the Pentagon, Lloyd J Austin III said the military was “laser focused” and “doing everything that we can to evacuate Americans, allies, Afghans who’ve worked alongside us, and also other courageous Afghans”.

But he added that the US is “not close to where we want to be” in terms of numbers of people flown out of the country.

He said “there have been some unfortunate incidents”, adding that “we continue to try to deconflict and create passageways for them to get to the airfield”.

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He said: “I don’t have the capability to go out and extend operations currently into Kabul.

“We do hear reports of people getting turned away from checkpoints. We’ve gone back and reinforced to the Taliban that they need to be allowed through,” he said.

Gen Austin added that the major issue for US forces currently was processing the people that are there “as fast as we can”.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark A Milley, said the situation in Afghanistan “is still very dangerous, very dynamic and fluid”.

He said US troops were currently “in harms way”, adding: “Right now there are troops at risk, and we are the United States military, and we fully intend to successfully evacuate all American citizens who want to get out of Afghanistan.”

Taliban militants are in and around Kabul, Gen Milley said, but were so far not interfering in US missions.

Sky News US correspondent Mark Stone said the US evacuation plans were for 10,000 American citizens first, followed by Afghans who had worked alongside US forces.

Describing the news conference as a “very uncomfortable watch”, he said the plan “relies wholly on negotiating with the Taliban” and added that Gen Austin “did not look like a confident man”.

US President Joe Biden gave an update on coronavirus measures and caused an uproar when he refused to answer questions from reporters, who were expected to confront him with more concerns over the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Anyone looking for a sign of confidence and a hint that the United States was in the process of turning this disaster around would have been disappointed, even alarmed, by the performance of the US Defense Secretary and his top general at their first Pentagon briefing.

They took to their podiums for an operational update on the situation at the airport in Kabul to extract US citizens and thousands of other eligible people fleeing the Taliban.

They began with statements.

“Our troops in Kabul are taking high risk to accomplish that mission…” General Mark Milley said.

“Currently, the security situation at the airport is stable. However, there are threats we are closely monitoring… The Taliban are in and around the Kabul airport but not interfering with our operations.”

Then a key point: “Through the State Department, the Taliban are facilitating safe passage to the airport for American citizens, that is, U.S. Passport holders….”

Interestingly in the embargoed text of the speech we had received before he delivered it, the word “facilitating” had read “guaranteeing”.

A subtle but intriguing change, because this entire mission, the safety of so many thousands of people and the recovery of America’s reputation rests on cooperation with the Taliban – the enemy for over two decades.

Then the questioning began. And this was where things got very uncomfortable.

Neither men was able to answer repeated questions about how they planned to extract the thousands of American citizens and other foreigners including Afghans who had formed part of the US mission in Afghanistan since 2001.

“Were the US troops able to go beyond the perimeter of the airport?” they were asked. It was the key question given that the assurances of safe passage by the Taliban do not appear to match the facts on the ground.

Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin was blunt. “The forces are there to secure the airport,” he said. “I don’t want to detract from that… we will continue to coordinate and deconflate with the Taliban to facilitate the flows.”

And then the killer line: “We don’t have the capacity to go out and collect Americans.”

On a domestic political perspective alone this is deeply damaging for President Biden.

Former President Trump is already making a huge, predictable and understandable fuss about it.

But beyond domestic politics, the lack of confidence these two men were able to display marks a deeply troubling moment for American leadership.

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