without the afghan military or a functioning government, would that have been enough to retake kabul to secure the passage of everyone to the airport? i really defer to my colleagues at the pentagon, but i can safely say it would have taken a substantial number of forces to try to retake the city or establish a much broader perimeter and of course, if that was ultimately opposed by the taliban, in a sense, it would have defeated the purpose because anyone outside that perimeter would not have been allowed to get through it to come to the airport. among other things. right. so once the afghan military collapsed as it disintegrates, we don t have enough troops to retake kabul and we are in the position of having to rely on the taliban or at least communicate with the taliban to make sure that we get individuals to the airport. that s correct. i just think this is important to put on the record
0 i thank you very much for the way that you have kept us engaged and informed as decisions have been made. as you pointed out, the biden administration was dealt a very difficult hand on the withdrawal from afghanistan. we all recognize we needed to withdrawal and the options were extremely limited. the mistakes made by previous administrations, we talked about it, but i think we need to understand that many of us did not support the 2002 campaign to go into iraq. one of those reasons was we wanted to complete the mission in afghanistan when we had a chance to do it when the taliban was diminished after our military came in after the attack on our country, but instead we went into iraq which was not engaged in the 9/11 activities, and we never fin finished afghanistan. a mistake by the bush administration. it doesn t negate the information that was made available to you about the strength of the afghan security forces and the ghani administration s will to stick with it in afghanistan
there is no disgruntled dnc employee leaking. now we don t admit the russian state did it, but there are these patriotic russians, hundreds of them spending millions of dollars of resources who did the hack. and i think at this point the whole seth rich story in which one of your competing networks has invested so ch energy and ability it disintegrates. vladimir putin disavowed it. that s also an important moment because it takes away the possibility for republicans in the senate to say this was anything other than a hostile foreign attack on the american electoral process. it does seem that the cover stories keep getting whisked away. the washington post came out and reveal that the house intelligence committee which spent a lot of time talking about unmaxing and devin nunes that. did it as well. last year the republican-controlled house intelligence committee asked u.s. spy agencies to reveal the names of individuals and organizations containing classified intelligence on russi
syria, none like the old boss. ben wedeman, turkey. that shows you the utter brutality of what is going on in syria right now. at the same time, listen to this. a 4-year-old left to make his way through the desert alone as refugees frantically escape the violence. it s one of the searing images of this brutal civil war which rages on and on and on as the latest efforts to stop it get bogged down. let s bring in our chief national security correspondent. how is this going on? we re really getting a vision inside the country as it disintegrates and it seems the most vulnerable, the ones that suffer the most. as a father, i think we are all having the same reaction and the sad fact is that int international efforts are failing. the two countries with arguably the most power to influence the
people have come here to watch this happen and a live look at the space shuttle and the four american astronauts preparing for this historic mission. a 12-day voyage, set to end when atlantis returns to earth on the 20th of july, 42 years to the day after man first landed on the moon. the clock you ll see at the bottom of the screen is on hold, until 17 minutes past 11:00 a.m. on the space coast, when the final countdown begins and if atlantis goes up here s what we can expect to see happen. t-6.6 seconds, nasa will start the main engine and a count down to solid rocket booster ignition and then, lift off. a little more than 8 minutes into the flight, that external fuel tank will separate, as we have seen so many times. essentially a gas tank and, the only component of the shuttle that is not reused. we re told most of it