Biden says US troops may stay in Afghanistan beyond 31 August deadline

Joe Biden has said US troops may stay past a 31 August deadline so as to evacuate all Americans from Afghanistan, and defended the withdrawal, saying there was no way for the US to pull out “without chaos ensuing”.

As critics in the US and abroad questioned his handling of the withdrawal, the president said in his first on-camera interview since the Taliban took Kabul that troops would stay in the country to get American citizens out.

“If there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay until we get them all out,” Biden told ABC News, signaling that he would listen to US lawmakers who had pressed him to extend the 31 August deadline he had set for a final pullout.

“We will determine at the time who is left and if they are not out we will stay,” he said, as more of the interview was aired on Thursday morning.

Related: ‘There was never a good time’: was Biden’s Afghanistan speech fair or accurate?

Asked if he thought the handling of the crisis could have gone better, Biden said: “No.”

“We’re gonna go back in hindsight and look … but the idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

The sentiment contradicts what Biden had said weeks back, when he insisted that it was “highly unlikely” that the Taliban would be “over running everything and owning the whole country”.

Stephanopoulos asked Biden if the chaos witnessed since Sunday when the Taliban entered Kabul had been “priced in” to the US planning, Biden said it had. But in a further clip aired on Thursday, he added: “Exactly what happened was not priced in.”

It has also emerged that classified intelligence documents from the past few weeks gave multiple warnings to the Biden administration of the prospect of an imminent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the likely rapid collapse of Afghan troops, with Kabul portrayed as highly vulnerable. It raises questions as to why the US administration was not better prepared for security and evacuations in the event the Taliban took control.

Biden did acknowledge in the interview, which took place on Wednesday, that the intelligence briefings did not bring a consensus and “the intelligence did not back in June or July that it was going to collapse like it did”.

The speed with which Taliban forces retook Afghanistan, as US and other foreign forces withdrew, has led to continued chaotic scenes at the airport with diplomats, foreign citizens and Afghans trying to flee. Taliban and Nato officials said a total of 12 people have been killed in and around the airport since Sunday.

The president took a crumb of comfort that war had not broken out, saying: “No one is being killed right now”.

However, several people were killed early on Thursday in the Afghan city of Asadabad when Taliban fighters fired on people waving the national flag at an Independence Day rally, a witness said, the annual celebration of the country’s independence from Britain in 1919. Those deaths came a day after three people were killed in a similar protest.

A Taliban official earlier urged people at the gates of the facility to go home if they did not have the legal right to travel.

However, there have been multiple reports of Afghans and foreigners with passports and papers being turned away at airport checkpoints by Taliban fighters, leading to foreign evacuation flights departing with empty seats.

The US said it has evacuated nearly 6,000 people from Afghanistan since Saturday but thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans who want to leave the country remain and it is feared the slow speed of evacuations was putting lives at risk. Educated young women, former US military translators and other Afghans most at-risk from the Taliban appealed to the Biden administration to get them on evacuation flights.

“If we don’t sort this out, we’ll literally be condemning people to death,” said Marina Kielpinski LeGree, the American head of nonprofit organisation Ascend.

Biden told ABC the Taliban were cooperating in helping get Americans out of the country, but admitted “we’re having some more difficulty” in evacuating US-aligned Afghan citizens.

He said: “They’re cooperating, letting American citizens get out, American personnel get out, embassies get out, et cetera, but they’re having … we’re having some more difficulty having those who helped us when we were in there.”

The president was asked what his response had been to images that emerged of packed US military planes taking off from Kabul airport as people clung to their sides. At least two people apparently fell to their deaths from the undercarriage soon after takeoff.

Biden replied: “What I thought was: we have to gain control of this. We have to move this more quickly. We have to move in a way in which we can take control of that airport. And we did.”

The Taliban seized on the Independence Day celebrations, stating that “as a result of our jihadi resistance, [we] forced another arrogant of power of the world, the United States, to fail and retreat from our holy territory of Afghanistan”.

Former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country of Sunday as Taliban troops entered Kabul, made his first appearance since it emerged he had been granted entry into the United Arab Emirates on “humanitarian grounds”.

Ghani, speaking in a video posted on Facebook, said he supported talks between the Taliban and former government officials, led by former president Hamid Karzai. He said he was “in talks” to return to Afghanistan and that he was making efforts to “safeguard the rule of Afghans over our country”.

Looking pale and gaunt, Ghani denied he had betrayed Afghans by fleeing and said the Taliban had entered Kabul, despite an agreement they would not.

“Do not believe whoever tells you that your president sold you out and fled for his own advantage and to save his own life,” said Ghani. “These accusations are baseless.”