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Kirby also acknowledged the Pentagon was abreast of the reports on airport access, which has been complicated by a Taliban-imposed curfew in Kabul and checkpoints erected across the capital city, as well as confusing documentation requirements.

“This is one of the reasons why communication with the Taliban is so important. And what I can tell you is we’re not unaware that there has been issues out in town and harassment of individuals,” Kirby said. But he did not describe any specific plans by the U.S. military to help potential evacuees reach the airport safely.

Kirby said the Pentagon was aware that shots were fired overnight by U.S. troops on the perimeter of the airport near the facility’s gates — with at least some of the rounds intended as nonlethal “crowd control measures” — but that there had been no hostile engagements between U.S. troops and the Taliban at the airport thus far.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Tuesday that U.S. officials believed the safe passage agreement with the Taliban could last until Aug. 31, President Joe Biden’s self-imposed deadline for the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. But Sullivan did not say whether evacuations would continue beyond the end of the month.

Kirby, too, declined to answer whether the evacuation mission would blow past the Aug. 31 end date, which a bipartisan group of 40 House lawmakers urged Biden to disregard Tuesday as the administration seeks to ramp up U.S. military flights out of Afghanistan.

“The mandate by the president is to complete this mission by the 31st of August, and that’s the target we’re shooting for,” Kirby said. “I won’t speculate about any possible different decisions going forward. That would have to be a decision made by the commander in chief.”

Kirby was similarly vague when it came to discussions with the Taliban about possibly lifting the curfew in Kabul. He said there is “constant communication with Taliban commanders outside the [air]field with respect to helping us with the flow,” and that U.S. officials “are talking to them about the effect that their curfew — and the limits that they’re putting on flow outside the airport — is having on our ability [to] accomplish the mission.”

As for the U.S. military potentially expanding its perimeter around the airport to allow easier access for potential evacuees, Kirby said he was “just not going to talk about potential future operations one way or the other.” And when asked whether the United States would work to ensure the safety of the hundreds of Afghan soldiers assisting American forces in securing the airport, Kirby said: “I don’t know. I couldn’t know that.”

The remarks from the Pentagon spokesperson came after 24 hours that saw the U.S. troop presence at the Hamid Karzai International Airport swell to roughly 4,500, with “a few hundred more” possibly arriving Wednesday, Kirby said. Biden has deployed up to 7,000 U.S. troops to Kabul in total.

During that same 24-hour period, 18 American C-17 transport planes departed from the airport carrying 2,000 passengers. Of that total, 325 were American citizens and the remainder consisted of Afghans and some NATO personnel. The number of incoming and outgoing U.S. aircraft is expected to remain relatively the same over the next 24 hours, Kirby said.

On Tuesday, Army Maj. Gen. William Taylor previewed that “the speed of evacuation will pick up,” with the U.S. military anticipating roughly “one aircraft per hour in and out” of the airport in Kabul. He predicted the Pentagon’s “best effort could look like 5,000 to 9,000 passengers departing per day.”

But Kirby appeared to temper those expectations Wednesday. He said the 5,000-9,000 figure “is not a goal,” but is “the max capacity that we think we’ll be able to reach when we’re at full throttle.” He later added: “It’s a capacity goal. We want to be able to have the capacity to flow that many out per day. … We believe that the capacity goals will get higher.”

Kirby also detailed an apparently new aspect of the U.S. military presence in Kabul, announcing that the Pentagon would be deploying “evacuation control teams” from the U.S. Marine Corps to help review the paperwork of Americans and Afghan allies seeking evacuation.