democracy and votes. so other democrats have to make that change of mind decision. i am hopeful that happens? i am glad you brought up senator king. when we read about senator schumer meeting with your colleagues like senators, king, cain, tester, about family discussions within the caucus to find a path forward on voting rights legislation, your sense what have the sticking points are now in those conversations? well, when some of my colleagues consider the phil buster to be protective of democracy, that makes it harder for them to come to the decision that it actually harms democracy and come to the same conclusions that angus king and tom carper came to. so they are going to need to travel that road and come to the conclusions that my two colleagues did. senator hirono, there are a
democrats to come up with a law that actually legalizes abortion. according to yahoo news susan collins called the texas abortion law inhumane and said she is working on a bipartisan bill to make roe v. wade the law of the land. i have to ask you whether you have heard of this and what you know about it. i just heard about it now. and i m glad. i would love to codify roe v. wade and in fact the house already passed a bill that would do that. it is great that susan is doing this. i am not one of the democrats she is working with. on the other hand, we all know that it s been the republicans who have been wanting to get rid of abortion rights forever. so susan is going to need to quite a few republicans to support this. but she is not going to have a struggle obviously with democrats on this? looks like senator hirono is speechless for the moment. we have a problem with her video.
generals. it would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to just resign because my advice isn t taken. this country doesn t want generals figuring out what orders we re going to accept and do or not. that s not our job. it s critical. my dad didn t get a choice to resign at iwo jima. they can t resign, so i m not going to resign. there s no way. if the orders are legal, we re in a different place. if the orders are legal from civilian authority, i intend to carry them out. senator hirono, please. thank you, mr. chairman. do i understand you correctly that your personal recommendation was that the troops remain in afghanistan, a
0 there s no doubt in my mind that our efforts prevented an attack on the homeland from afghanistan, which was our core original mission. and everyone who has served in that war has been proud. your service mattered. beginning in 2011, we steadily drew down our troop numbers, consolidated and closed bases and retrograded equipment from afghanistan. at the peak in 2011, we had 97,000 u.s. troops alongside 41,000 nato troops in afghanistan. ten years later, when ambassador calisade signed the agreement on 29, february, 2020, the united states had 12,600 u.s. troops with 8,000 nato and 10,500 contractors. this has been a ten-year multi-administration drawdown. not a 19-month or 19-day ne-yo. under the doha agreement, the u.s. would begin to withdraw its forces, contingent upon the taliban meeting certain conditions, which would lead to a political agreement between the taliban and the government of afghanistan. there were seven conditions applicable to the taliban and eight conditions app