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
and there is a whole bunch of you know, a whole bunch of caveats that the taliban had to adhere to, to honor that deal. and i may be mistaken on this, but i know one of them was that they had to denounce their association with al qaeda. they have not done that. and, in fact, there is a defense department inspector general report released just this month that they still enjoy a casual link together. so the taliban have not held up to that february 29th deal. and in terms of the afghan government, they weren t even a part of it. this sort of absence of the afghan government is, to me, the kind of defining feature of all this. it s corruption in the fact that it was unable to hold the country, that it was seen, i think, widely perceived among afghans as just wildly predatory
together. at an earlier coalition government would have been able to do that. one of the head-spinning facts we find ourselves with, james, now is i remember reading some great reporting by dexter filkins in the new yorker about the early days of the u.s. assaults in afghanistan in which there was a backchannel coordination with, of all people, kasim soleimani, and the iranians who had a shared enemy in the taliban. that alliance fell apart. 20 years later we find ourselves on way out essentially a de facto aleans with the taliban against isis who we had been fighting in iraq alongside the iranians. like, the way this has played out is almost impossible to get your head around. right. and we have to remember that the peace deal that was signed on february 29th of 2020, between the united states and the taliban, excluded the afghan government. they were not a part that have deal.
horizon. how do you that when you re leaving. how you do that from the comments we re gone as of tuesday the 31st of august. with regard to the peace treaty here it is. it s six pages in length. it was signed on february 29th, 2020 which was a saturday, leap day in a leap year. you know what also happened that day? south carolina primary that catapulted joe biden to the head of the democratic primary. in the agreement it states four parts to it. one of them mentioned four times intra afghan negotiations between both sides. the afghan government and the taliban. for whatever reason. blame who ever you want to blame that didn t happen according to this deal. jesse. he does haven t to go by the trump afghan deal. he shredded so many trump deals. now he has to do what trump did.
0 your fine men and women, 18 died and was a preview of coming attractions. now in afghanistan, where this year not a single u.s. soldier had died or even been wounded, that s broken today with the death of 12 and 15 inches. pentagon calling it a complex terror attack. saying two isis suicide bombers were responsible. a team of reporters will give us updates throughout the hour. first chilling news saying he expects the did he doily isis attacks to continue. let isis break through the check point to launch this attack. we don t think they would do something like that? come on. they don t know what is going on right now. we have no handle on the situation. right now we re basically sitting ducks. i have never seen a tactical blunder like this before. you have to go way back. it s living the deadliest incident in a decade for afghanistan. we don t know how bad it will guilty. get dark soon. isis is taking pot shots into the airport at aircraft. joe biden said there would be no tali