capability? what happened there? i had an op-ed with ambassador crocker of the new york times in may, warning the administration that if you reni going to not leave the light footprint, if you re not going to leave a residual force, at least start evacuating american citizens, uathe interpreters, and establih this intelligence capability. they failed on all three counts and now we re in a far more dangerous situation. maria: so and diswrows be clear for our and just to be clear for our audience, isr, intelligence strategic reconnaissance, is that right, that means we don t have any of it, we don t have any intelligence, we don t have any abilities given the fact that we ve closed down bagram. so as you said earlier, we are dark. michael waltz, your thoughts on that and the fact that now afghanistan has started a new government and i want to run a sound bite of the taliban when
and clearly al qaeda has aspirations to attack america, always has. isis-k obviously has aspirations greater than afghanistan. that s why they have fundamental disagreements with the afghan taliban. i don t think they have the wherewithal yet to conduct an attack against america. why would we permit them to acquire it and why we wanted to keep the modest force there. remember, c.i.a. bases were focused on these organizations. al qaeda and isis. that was their primary focus and the intelligence capability. that capability has been very successful in striking down al qaeda and preventing them to rise up and be a threat to the united states. we ve killed multiple levels of their leaders. bin laden the most notable but also successive leaders one after the other. the presence we ve had there has been our guarantor that it
will say this. what this wasn t was a failure of intelligence. somebody knew, somebody talked. perhaps it would have been worse without that alert that went out, what, 24 hours ago, about the lack of safety. and indeed the danger at the airport gates. i am wondering how it could have been better, however, based on that tip we had. brian i think we talked on tuesday that this was the worst-case scenario, that there could be a terrorist attack of some sort, t airport tt we still have intelligence capability. we knew this was coming on the warnings went out. i think what this shows is that this is not a place where we
they re calling the shots but we have some leverage with them as well. after we leave we certainly are going to have an intelligence capability. not as great as it has been. but nonetheless and i won t predict this but speculate about it. the taliban may be calling upon our intelligence services to help save them from isis-k and from al qaeda. i m not predicting that but they may be in trouble economically and they may be assaulted by extremist groups more extreme than they are. they may have to fight that war as well. i think thr period
legal challenge if this is how this went down. this is how this is going down. is that in the works? like i said, congress is going to use every tool at our disposal. we will pursue this in court. when we return from our recess in a week, i plan to convene a hearing of the military appropriation subcommittee and bring our military leadership in front of our committee and ask them point blank whether they think a border wall is more important than the facilities that we have already funded to make sure that we can keep our troops ready to defend our nation, train them so that they are ready, make sure that we have our intelligence capability at the top of our game. we re talking about one of the projects, kate, is an intelligence center in europe whose job it is to keep an eye on russia. you can bet that putin is putting his feet up on the desk and laughing at president trump because he is jeopardizing our military readiness here