some air support than eventually the weight of the reinforcements, the 40,000 syrians and whoever else they re bringing in or whatever china does, it s going to weigh against ukraine. and and there s no really good peace solution, no diplomacy looks promising at this point. and that is sad but true. that is the evidence before us that really putin and russia are in no mood to talk. i want to look ahead with you to that nato meeting next week, though. and if you could please take us inside that room. you have been the nato commander. what could they be looking at in terms of trying to deter putin or even strike back at him especially if he ends up making moves in ukraine or outside of ukraine? you know, when you re a military planner, that s what you did, what kind of options could they be looking at because you know they re going to look at them next week. i m sure those options have already been worked out by the nato military staff and supreme ally commander to europe and
their people to shoot at. and to allow this kind of carnage, i think people understand what s eventually going to happen to these people. but in the interim we ve got to quit referring to them as military planners and need to start naming them by rank and by name and blaming them and shaming them and sanctions them. we ve got to stop saying that this is sort of some abstract military planner. these are named generals, named colonels and they ought to be shown with wanted posters for what they re doing inside the country right now. so the weapons they re using, though, do you think it s because they don t have more sophisticated weapons to use, that could be more precise or do you think that they do have them in their arsenal and those are coming later? i don t think they care. i don t think they care in the least. their job is to terrorize the
i think part of it is the second we surge troops into kabul, first up, our bulwark, like our base of operations was an urban airport with one runway in the middle of the largest city in afghanistan. so tactically that is a huge problem. secondarily, when we landed with 5,000 troops or 2,000 initially and then we spun it up, we should ve pushed those troops outwards to go save americans at that point. and we hit a defensive position. look, i m not the tactical guy to sit back here and second-guess all of that. but what i do know is that we ended up in a situation where we re relying on former special operators, you know, people that had relationships with these afghan sivs. we talk about the pineapple express. but pineapple express is one of many of these unofficial networks getting people to the fence. there is going to be heroic stories written. but there is no doubt that that position we found ourselves in is not one that any military planner would ever have authored
point, i don t know what is going to happen after august 31st. but given that logistics so far, does not look good. harris: yeah. and it emily: you could negotiate a bite harris: that would mean that we had to start, like, now with their american troops, right? i mean, it is going to take some time to get off the ground. and the word stranded is a lot better than the word i have heard used and that is hostages. i have been a military planner. they are going to start backwards planning right now. they are going to close those doors and it is not far from now. as we shut those gates, and fly away. harris: that is] we move on. with the president standing by his deadline, he is not going to move on august 31st. that is leaving afghanistan a week from today. his cia director went there yesterday to meet with the leader of the taliban picnics,
happened. what did we hear? reporter: there was new detail and coming and this is part of the administration s effort to be forward-looking. to try and resolve the crisis as much as they can and put aside the incrimination of how it led to this point. but we saw the pentagon, admiral kirby talk a short time ago about all of the efforts that the military is doing. you re right. 4,000 troops on the the ground by tomorrow and next day there will be a thousand or potentially 1500 troops more than that trying to focus on security at the airport there. and we heard specifically some 5,000 people could be evacuated every day. that is americans there. there is an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 americans around the kabul area as well, of course, as the afghan partners. but take a listen to this estimate from the top military planner. as part of this force concludes, the speed of evacuation will pick up.