MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Nearly 200 Afghan nationals have been flown on to the United States after their special immigration visas were processed in the Philippines as part of an agreement between Manila and Washington, the U.S. Embassy in Manila said Sunday.

The Afghans left the Philippines in several groups on commercial flights last week after completing their application process for resettlement in the U.S., according to the embassy spokesperson Kanishka Gangopadhyay.

An embassy statement expressed “deep appreciation to the government of the Philippines for their cooperation and support for U.S. efforts to assist Afghan special immigrants.”

The Afghans, including many children, arrived in the Philippines on Jan. 6. Details of their numbers and location were kept secret by U.S. and Philippine officials. Washington covered the cost of their stay in the Philippines.

The Afghans primarily worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan or were deemed eligible for U.S. special immigrant visas but were left behind when U.S. and NATO forces withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years of war in August 2021 as the Taliban seized power.

At the time, the Taliban takeover exposed Afghan supporters of U.S. forces to potential retaliatory attacks by Afghanistan’s new rulers.

Outgoing President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump have blamed one another for the chaotic pullout of U.S. forces.

Biden discussed the Afghan resettlement issue with Philippines leader Ferdinand Marcos Jr. when he visited the U.S. last year, Philippine officials said. In July, the Philippines agreed to temporarily host a U.S. immigrant visa processing center for the Afghan nationals although there were concerns over security due to threats faced by some of the Afghans trying to flee from the Taliban rule.

A senior Philippine official said last year that the accommodation in the Philippines was a one-time deal.

Marcos has rekindled relations with the U.S. since his 2022 election victory and has allowed an expansion of the American military presence under a 2014 defense agreement in a decision that has alarmed China.

The Marcos administration has also broadened military and defense ties with the U.S., Japan and Australia and moved to build stronger security relations with France, New Zealand and Canada to strengthen its territorial defense, including in the disputed South China Sea.

That has dovetailed with the Biden administration efforts to boost an arc of security alliances in the Indo-Pacific to better address concerns over China’s increasingly aggressive actions, including in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and in the Taiwan Strait, that have raised tensions to their highest level in decades.

Funding cuts to Afghanistan are the biggest threat to helping the country’s women, the chief of a top aid agency warned Sunday.

Jan Egeland, the secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said women and girls were bearing the brunt of dwindling financial support for nongovernmental groups and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.

The NRC helped 772,484 Afghans in 2022. That number fell to 491,435 in 2023. Last year, the aid agency helped 216,501 people. Half of its beneficiaries are women.

Egeland, who has made several visits to Afghanistan since 2021, said: “We see one after the other peer organization cutting programming and staff in the last two years. The biggest threat to programs helping Afghan women is funding cuts. The biggest threat to the future well-being of Afghan women is (the lack of) education.”

The Taliban takeover in August 2021 drove millions into poverty and hunger after foreign aid stopped almost overnight.

Sanctions against the country’s new rulers, a halt on bank transfers and frozen billions in Afghanistan’s currency reserves have cut off access to global institutions and the outside money that supported the aid-dependent economy before the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces.

The U.N. and others have urged the international community to continue supporting the beleaguered country.

Organizations like the Norwegian Refugee Council have helped keep public services afloat through education and health care programs, including nutrition and immunization.

But women and girls face more obstacles in accessing health care and education because of restrictions imposed by authorities and an ongoing shortage of female medical professionals, also exacerbated by Taliban decrees.

Egeland said Afghan women and girls had not forgotten world leaders telling them their “number one priority” was education and human rights. “Now we can’t even fund livelihood programming for widows and single mothers,” he told The Associated Press by telephone from the western province of Herat.

The international community provided humanitarian assistance in many countries where they disagreed with local policies. But opposition to Taliban policies, together with a “general starving” of aid funding in many countries, was worsening the shortfall in Afghanistan, he said.

Egeland said most of his discussions with Taliban officials on his trip were about the need to resume classes for women and girls. “They still argue that it will happen, but the conditions are not right,” he said. “They say they need to agree on what the conditions are.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will bid farewell Friday to the forces and personnel he has led through a tumultuous term that had three major military crises, a global pandemic and a personal brush with cancer that became a flashpoint for the way it was mishandled.

Austin, 71, spent 41 years of his life in a military uniform. He retired as a highly decorated four-star general who earned a Silver Star — an award given for gallantry in action — for leading troops from the front in the initial 2003 invasion of Iraq.

He is one of the many Pentagon leaders who have served in combat and has “dust on his boots” — something President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has falsely claimed is his distinction and why he is needed to restore a military hollowed out by “woke” diversity initiatives.

“There have been a lot of narratives out there about how capable, how weak our military is,” Austin said in an interview with The Associated Press. “You’ve just got to look at the things we have done, that we continue to do, at a moment’s notice.”

Austin retired from the Army in 2016 only to be asked to return to the Pentagon by President Joe Biden in 2021, making history as the nation’s first Black defense secretary.

He took the helm of the Pentagon at the height of COVID-19 and just weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump’s supporters. His early months saw the department working through a divisive COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the force and a deep dive to determine whether there was a wider extremism problem in the ranks. More than 230 people with a military background were arrested in connection with the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection.

Austin repeatedly said he believed extremism was not a problem. Indeed, service members and veterans who radicalize make up a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the millions who have honorably served, though an Associated Press investigation last year found it was on the rise.

But it would be the shocking collapse of the Afghan government to the Taliban that would forever mar Austin’s tenure. The U.S. withdrawal had been previously negotiated by Trump, and, because of that, there were only 2,500 U.S. forces in Afghanistan when Biden took office.

To this day, there’s a deep sense of betrayal among some veterans over the loss of Afghanistan, which became a key part of Trump’s return to office.

Biden’s decision to move forward with the withdrawal led to a chaotic two weeks in August 2021, when the Air Force evacuated more than 124,000 people from Afghanistan in just 17 days.

Air Force C-17s and chartered aircraft landed at Kabul airport in a non-stop operation, but then 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans were killed by a suicide bomber just days before the last U.S. service member left.

All the hard-won gains by women and for democracy began being dismantled by the Taliban.

“There was a lot of speculation on what would happen if we left Afghanistan. The world was going to come to an end. We were going to get attacked every day, and that just hasn’t happened,” Austin said. “Some horrible things have happened in terms of women’s rights. We’ll just have to continue to work on those things.”

The Biden administration was still reeling from the withdrawal when it began warning that Russian President Vladimir Putin was assembling hundreds of thousands of troops along Ukraine’s border and was preparing to invade. In response to the invasion, Austin created the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a coalition of more than 50 partner nations that have sent more than $126 billion in weapons and training to Kyiv in the three years since.

Then Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

Austin directed two aircraft carriers to sail immediately to the region, and in the year since, the widened conflict has spilled into the Red Sea, disrupting trade and engaging the U.S. Navy in the most intense running sea battle since World War II.

The Navy has engaged not only drones but also anti-ship ballistic missiles fired by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and ballistic missiles fired at Israel directly by Iran.

On one of Austin’s final days in office, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report on his mishandling of his prostate cancer diagnosis in late 2023, when he failed to inform the White House of being hospitalized and incapacitated following complications with his treatment.

Austin is known as a deeply private man, and that desire for privacy came to a head in his diagnosis and hospitalization.

“I don’t want my health to be a media circus,” Austin texted his chief of staff while hospitalized. It became just that, and after revelations that he had not notified Congress for days that he was incapacitated, new processes were instituted to prevent the lack of notification from happening again.