scenes to prepare that kind of address. i think it is fair to say this is the worst day of the biden presidency, when you have americans in harm s way killed and injured and this has been a presidency dealing with life and death drama of covid and economic worries, and then when you have men and women in uniform that are sent on a controversial mission in that there are so many opinions about what should happen with afghanistan, clearly a very difficult day for the president. he often speaks of not wanting to send more sons and daughters to afghanistan, speaks of his own son, late beau biden who served in iraq. you talk about all of that emotion, the decision making and need in what is clearly a moment on the ground to get facts, it would seem to me it will be awhile before the president addresses the nation. but we would expect to not get ahead of anything official, we would expect this kind of moment
have built a continuing nato mission around 10,000 troops, they would have stayed, but when the u.s. made the decision to pull out, they were on board with that. admiral james stavridis, and it is a tough day losing american service members in a mission, but i know they all knew how dangerous this mission was, but it does not mean that we take these deaths any lightly. think of their families today. think of the families today. and thinking of the families who have not gotten the call yet, and wondering if they will get the call, too. thank you, jim. according to new estimates of the new york times, there are 250,000 afghans in afghanistan who worked for united states who have not been evacuated yet. so how is this latest attack on the ground going to affect the evacuations of the further. joining me is mark packette who is focused on this issue of the
decision-making process about evacuations. the possibility which at that time was a threat stream of warnings, could that disrupt evacuations and what would they need to do to complete the mission of securing all americans who want to leave afghanistan, the number still at this point is somewhere roughly a thousand, not all of them determined to be american citizens who want to leave. that s the latest numbers we have there. then how does that factor into the deadline of august 31st. we ve been told the president has been briefed on contingency plans, that had taken place before today s event. he spent an ex-tense if amount of time in the situation room with the defense secretary, national security team. we are told us in the oval office now. and the real challenge for the president is when this began, this evacuation began, and there was the initial chaos when the taliban took over and kabul fell, civilian deaths at the beginning, then the
mission. option three would be to extend the mission, open it more broadly, perhaps conduct strikes against isis-k at their camps and so forth. i don t think the president is going to go there. i suspect the president will go there and he will land on some variant of option two. are there realistic targets for isis-k or is there intelligence solid enough that we were forewarned about this attack? so what is the sense of how quickly we could acquire the targets if we want to? my sense is that we could in fact find and exploit targets. it would be a big mission, a long range mission, and we would have to coordinate it. we would not have to, but we would probably need to coordinate it with the taliban.
president, what the options are being put forth on him, put forth before him now of dealing with this current security mess that we have at that airport, it s obviously harder to get people into the airport, it is not going to get easier, going to get harder. what are the various realistic options to finish the evacuation? option one will be wrap it up right now. stop taking anybody else and get our military out of there. i don t think he will select that. smack too much of lebanon response to the terrorist bombing where we decamped immediately. option two, chuck, continue the mission with a very firm eye toward getting out of here as currently postulated on tuesday, try to push the security perimeter out further, try to work with the taliban to get better security, but effectively option two is continue the