u.s. has to rely on the taliban for security, at this point? well, i i don t think there s any option. there s been this debate about whether the americans, including the military, goes out and picks people up across across kabul. i think if they did that, that would be a tremendous mistake. i know that s troubling to hear but imagine this. hundreds of convoys of u.s. military going through taliban-controlled streets. where the commanders in the taliban don t don t control every 17-year-old who s got an ak-47. one of those one of those goes wrong when the military s going out picking up, for example, a u.s. citizen in kabul and there s a firefight. i wouldn t want that because that risks the entire operation. there is no easy solution here. we got to depend on the taliban because we can t send out the army, don. says a lot about the situation that we re in, though, phil. yeah. thank you, sir. i appreciate it. talk, soon. thanks. people with covid flooding a monoclon
it s violent. the area s controlled by taliban fighters who periodically fire weapons into the air to push afghans back. more on the chaotic situation tonight from cnn s nick paton walsh. nick. don, at the end of america s longest war, the real final about that they have to pull off here involved getting so many thousands of people onto the last part of afghanistan america controls and to do that, they have to ask many americans, many afghans loyal to america, to run a horrifying gauntlet through kabul out to the airport. what should be the easiest drive in kabul is the reason the city is on edge. head up the main airport road since monday when i drove it and you run into the taliban. then, they were beating people back perhaps to clear the civilian runway crowded with desperate people then. by wednesday, it had gotten worse when they were clearly stopping people from using their escape to america.
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said, getting out 5, 7, 9,000 people a day. that is pretty impressive if we can get them out without a lot of casualties. but there is no dispute that the initial days of this went ugly. we should say it. and then, the next question is how do we get to that 5, 7, 9,000? and why didn t we get to it today? i tell you, don, the thing i ll be watching when you talking about the reports you just mentioned about the situation outside kabul, isn t whether we reach 5 or 7 or 9,000 a day. it s how confident we are that the taliban s acceptance that people are going to the airport, that that acceptance holds. boy, is that going to last another day? another two days? because remember, those people at the airport are regarded by the taliban as the enemy. those are the people who supported the americans. we got to move fast because the taliban, eventually, is going to come after these people. what what we re learning is that the the military commanders are in constant communication with talib
there she is, right there. crowds outside the airport, pushed back by troops. and to make it inside the airport, you have got to get past the taliban fighters. then, the afghan special forces commandos. then, the u.s., itself. the state department is saying that they expect 20 flights to leave afghanistan by tonight. but flights are still not being filled to capacity because it s so hard to get into that airport even though the president, joe biden, has told top aides that he doesn t want to see empty seats on flights leaving kabul. and we are learning tonight that more than a dozen u.s. diplomats wrote an internal memo to the secretary of state, antony blinken, this was back in mid-july calling for action to get afghan allies out of the country before the government collapsed. they felt their warnings were being ignored. but this is the face of the evacuation, now. this is the face of desperation. an exhausted afghan child sleeping on a floor of a u.s. air force cargo plane. draped in