say look, the taliban owns this problem. it s up to them, am part, to make sure that americans can get out of this country safely and end this war as cleanly as can still be achieved at this point. garrett, i think that s ideal but unlikely. we have several examples of what happens when there s a rapid change of power. two examples are mogadishu and somalia and baghdad in iraq. that was kind of the story in 2003. we rapidly collapsed country, quickly took baghdad, installed a government to hold things in place, tried to embrace security. and with each day that situation became more and more protracted, became more and more dangerous. insurgencies started to mount, cripple activities started to take advantage of it. i don t see it likely that the taliban, while we say they have taken over afghanistan, they definitely do not control afghanistan. they don t have the kind of structure, while they ve taken a
what we forget is while we hear terms like the taliban is taking control or taking over, they do not control all of kabul. they do not control all of afghanistan. there s many competing interests on the ground. since the u.s. showed up there last week, undoubtedly extremist groups that want to attack u.s. targets on the way out or foreign actors that might want to embrace different extremist groups. think of scenarios where we ve heard of russian influence actors working with extremists to try to target americans last year. that was one of the new stories we were talking about. it becomes an indefensible target for the u.s. over time. and the town is not controlled, the taliban don t control the town. they do need to move essentially to a place where they can more securely extract americans or come up with alternative plans and do it quickly. clint, as i m talking to you, an alert just went out from the u.s. embassy, warning u.s.
marines and this navy medic? of course it s horrific. but any time you airlift out 100,000 people, you end up being somewhat of a sitting duck. i mean the bad guys, the crazy extremists, the suicide bombers knew that whenever this airlift was going to happen, throngs of people would gather wanting to get to the promise of america and they would have an opportunity to go in and blow themselves up and hurt americans. that danger was going to be there, no matter how this withdrawal occurred. and it is certainly not a good reason to stay there. we have been the gdp of afghanistan for long enough. you know, the other thing that s going to happen, joy, when america is gone, when the outsider is no longer a unifying force, people need to remember this. there are 14 different nationalities, ethnicities and religions recognized in the afghan national anthem. they are a tremendously divided country and they re going to have a huge problem trying to
something that intelligence was aware of. in fact, americans had been warned against. other western citizens had been warned against this possibility and told to stay away from that gate. we still have clint watts with us. clint, to me, this also highlights how much more difficult this air lift is going to be as we get into the final days, as the pentagon starts to, in the term of art, retrograde the forces that have been conducting this air lift, protecting this airfield, to evacuate your rear guard, as it were seems even more dangerous than what they ve been doing the last week or so. that s exactly right, garrett. from now until the last u.s. force are out, we re in a very precarious situation. admiral tsvaridis was talking about that on morning joe, and he is absolutely right. we are one moment away from blackhawk down scenario.
shot, too. that may not even make as big a difference as far as potential for casualties. what it could tell us is whether the airport perimeter was breached or not. i think we need to also take a look at obviously, officials don t know who was behind this yet but who may have had the momentum or the interest in carrying out an attack hike this. right. and all signs would point to more likely isis than certainly a taliban attack. the taliban have been working in conjunction and coordination with the military. but isis has a real vested interest in an attack like this. in most cases, large isis is the enemy of the taliban there. they want to do something to disrupt what s happening. they disrupt both the u.s. and the taliban intent of getting americans out. an attack like this does exactly that. with the threat, the gates have been shut down. people have not been able to get through. it has put a real thrown a real wrench into the evacuation