During the misnamed "Summer of Love," riots, looting, vandalism, and political violence was carried out by radical leftists under the (often literal) Antifa and Black Lives Matter banners. The violent
calendar and executed his vision with little regard for american lives or the real threats that we face. i do appreciate your open, your honest, and expert participation in communicating to this committee what went wrong. i think our american citizens are at a real crossroads right now where they are questioning the leadership from this president and this biden s blunt be erase bud the united states must account for them through a revamped counterterrorism strategy that recognizes the newfound momentum of terrorists and new threats emanating from the middle east in addition to rising challenges that we see coming from china and russia. pretty high stakes. secretary austin, i d like to start with you. did president biden or any of his national security advisers
0 thank you, senator. you re right, the tempo upped significantly, the taliban continued to make advances. our entire chain of command, myself, the chairman, general mckenzie, routinely engage the afghan leadership to encourage them to solidify their defensive plans, to make sure they were providing the right logistics to their troop, and further stiffen their defenses. to no avail. to compound that, president ghani continued to make changes in the leadership of the military, and this created further problems for the afghan security forces. mr. secretary, i don t mean to interrupt you but my time is elapsing. so this gets to the overestimation that i think the overly optimistic assessment. even as late as july you re still encouraging the afghan special forces. you re expecting the ghani government to remain, but that was not the case. in december of 2019 the washington post reported that the u.s. military commanders privately expressed a lack of confidence that the afghan army a
central intelligence agency has an ability to start to generate some sources in country that can give us some eyes on target. we re not reliant exclusively on human intelligence. look, the human can be biased just like a device can be biased. but it s important for us to realize that we have had some great successes with over-the-horizon type of striking. we have some incredible intelligence capabilities, but it does render this counterterrorism strategy, upon which we want to make sure that afghanistan does not go back into totally ungoverned space where the isiss of the world and the other jihadis can begin to kind of populate and start to rehearse for their next big strike. the united states really has to up its game. and it knows how to do this. but you re exactly right. it takes multiple forms of intelligence in order to validate a target before you pull the trigger against it. and when you don t have one of
Israel and region continue to feel reverberations of 9/11 two decades later ejpress.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ejpress.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.