education, they demanded that their girls should go to school, then they showed more leniency. but now it s a different story. now they have the whole country, they are fully in control. we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. we would be able to witness what is going to happen moving forward, really, after this month starting. but the problem is something different. if we are abandoning afghanistan, if there is no access, if the airport is not going to function, how are we even going to know what is going to happen? right now, as yasmeen was reporting, there is an easier life with taliban 2.0. but is it really taliban 2.0? you wanted the taliban to
vulnerable are little afghan girls. what are you hearing? are afghan girls able to get out? no, they are not. people have gotten visas. some people cannot get to the airport. i was asked to look for people in the airport who could facilitate their coming in. that s not happening. we re looking at the borders with pakistan and it s too unsafe to get them all the way there, so i figure the afghan women and girls are going to be left behind and that s something of serious concern to all women s rights groups here. what do you hear from people on the ground in afghanistan about what s going on with women and girls specifically? anecdotally people have gotten out and said the taliban fighters are grabbing 13, 14-year-old girls and forcing them into i don t even want to call it a marriage because it s not a marriage, but that kind of relationship. what are you hearing? what we are hearing is the sense of panic is growing
of the embassy, of afghans, it will sap the will of our soldiers to stand up and defend our country. it was massive to believe that eye mass evacuation too early would have led to what we wanted to avoid, which was a major collapse of the government. even if we had begun it early, there still would have been tens of thousands of afghans that the collapse of the government would have rushed the airport. there still would have been the scenes we re seeing today with all the incumbent security threats that are attached to it. in retrospect, obviously the government and the security forces of afghanistan did collapse, so we probably should have started that evacuation earlier. but we were laboring under the belief that they wouldn t, and we were trying not to take steps that would lead to that overnight collapse. so i think that is the difficulty with just suggesting that we should have begun all of this earlier. but the preparation for the worst-case scenario did not seem
peter, the focus right now is to get the remaining americans out of the country, the afghan partners out of the country, and as i said in response to phil s question, this is not a preferred relationship, or a situation that we would have designed if we had started from scratch. that is very clear. but right now, we need to continue to coordinate and that is the focus for the next couple of days. the last one, you said that we will have a great deal of leverage over the taliban after we leave, and you think that we will have more leverage with no troops on the ground than we do with thousands of troops on the ground? to be clear, one of the steps that the president directed the secretary of state this morning was to engage with the international partners to determine what the path forward looks like, and there are key components here. the taliban wants a functioning airport, and so do we. they want a leveraging community, and there is more to
as other countries are coming in, they are evacuating certain numbers of where they are in their capability or requirement. so i have thif think that s where you have seen some of the differences in the outwar flow. you have to go back to 110,000 total. so as we started just under almost just a few weeks ago at zero to up 110,000 we would see some of those numbers start to come down. let me go back to the phones. sam. john, as part of the exit, is it the u.s. intention to leave a functioning airport with radars that work, computers that work? what s the obligation for what you all leave behind? airport is functioning, sam.