Pentagon seeks installations for Afghan evacuees

As the U.S. military moves to complete its troop drawdown, and the Taliban continue to gain territory in Afghanistan, the Pentagon is "looking very hard" to find installations where Afghans who aided the U.S. war effort can be housed as they apply for special immigrant visas.

"We don't have a perfect sense of what the demand signal is going to be," said Pentagon Spokesman John Kirby.

"But what we're assuming is that we've got to have some flexible options," he said.

Kirby indicated some of the installations that are being considered are on U.S. territory, while others are in a host nation where the U.S. military is using the facility.

"I would anticipate that that we will want to be ready as a government for a range of different places that they can go to as they continue to process their way through the system," he said.

U.S. forces earlier this week vacated Bagram Airfield — the U.S. epicenter of the conflict to oust the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. that triggered the war.

Remaining U.S. troops are now concentrated in Kabul, the capital.

In another matter, Kirby commented on whether the Pentagon might make COVID vaccinations mandatory for U.S. troops and Defense Department personnel in the future.

"The vaccines are under emergency use authorization right now, and so they are voluntary.," Kirby said.

"If these vaccines are approved by the FDA, then the secretary will certainly talk to the services and health care professionals here at the department to determine what the best options are going forward, which could include making them mandatory," he said.