personnel from the u.s. embassy there. a state department official tells nbc news almost all u.s. personnel have relocated to a facility at the hamid karzai international airport. officials today said the u.s. is put 1g,000 more american troops into kabul to aid if the mass evacuations of u.s. personnel. now, i m the last person to criticize joe biden s decision to go through with this withdrawal from afghanistan. i support it. but it is botched execution and wishful thinking and it s failure to anticipate the speed of the taliban s advance against demoralized afghan soldiers working for a weak government. made even weaker by corruption. the biden administration failed to prepare for the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding now. for months, the administration has struggled just to evacuate 2,000 interpreters and family members who aided the u.s. coalition in afghanistan. but as many as 100,000 of them have sought asylum. and as the taliban noose
into the military was worth it. but the troops killed since 2001 hadn t died in vain. george w. bush said it. barack obama said it. donald trump said it. joe biden said it. just in april. we have trained and equipped a standing force of over 300,000 afghan personnel to date and hundreds of thousands over the past two decades and they ll continue to fight valiantly on behalf of the afghans at great cost. and yet, here we are. because no one wanted to tell the simple truth that american ingenuity in dollars and weaponry cannot remake the world in our image. our leaders knew. the washington post 2019 investigation into the afghanistan papers, a trove of classified interviews with u.s. and afghan officials showed that those officials knew victory was an illusion, but they told the american public otherwise.
hard. they re frankly at a great risk right now and that s why we have to get them out. but there are others who have neglected their duty. we have to be sophisticated enough to have a conversation that breaks the nuance here. congressman, we re out of time, but i have to ask this question. given this debacle in afghanistan, barbara lee was the only member of congress to vote against it in 2001. i know you weren t in congress then. but you have the debacle in afghanistan. iraq, libya. at what point does congress start trying to rein in presidents who go to war without proper debate, without proper discussion, without an end goal, without an exit strategy? we are long past due for that. we can t do blank checks anymore. that s why i called for the repeal of these authorizations of military force. we can t have three generations of americans going to war over 20 years spending trillions of dollars without having a robust discussion about that all the time. these aumss, as they re cal
we often talk about iraqi wmd s being the big lie that dented or collapsed so much trust in the american establishment. will afghanistan take that role as well? it seems like it tonight. i think it s much bigger than that. in other words, there is no minimizing the symbolism of the united states losing so totally to an islamic insurgents. two decades after 9/11, the anniversary of 9/11, we are going to have the taliban flag flying over the islamic embassy of afghanistan. so this says something about not just that the united states cannot be trusted to take care of its friends, but that the u.s. strategy, the way it approach the middle east and south asia is untenable and unviable and ultimately, the united states cannot sustain it. and america s enemies need to wait out the united states and the u.s. will fold and leave. and america s friends are paying attention that they can t trust in the fact u.s. strategy works.
government, who are now at risk ofmassacred, because there s a lot of paperwork to be done. before they can get special visa status. that sounds bizarrely immoral. do you agree? i agree. when i talk to afghans, they tell me that this idea that the afghan military could at all stand on its own is nonsense because the united states designed a military that was highly dependent or even the capabilities we proclaimed on the united states. for instance, needs and needed at that time, u.s. air support, which could not operate without the u.s. servicing the helicopters and the aircraft. so those capabilities did not exist or cannot exist without the u.s. servicing them and supporting them. so there s something disen general with us in what the general was saying. there s also a genuine vetting process. the numbers are huge.