sure the people we brought in would not do us harm. harris: but in the end look at how he handled it. the siv process under a normal rhythm every year when afghans controlled the government. it was never intended to be an emergency evacuation or under the guise of a retreat. that s what we were dealing with. the siv process was going out the window. we were evacuating within days of the collapse of afghanistan and his military. it s right to conduct this it review. gets facts out to the american people. i hope they are comprehensive in dealing with this. and let it go where it needs to
mistakes. we have to figure out why we didn t get our american citizens and sivs out of there sooner. harris: did the president need to be part of this. president biden? do they need to pull him in? they won t do that. the ig will investigate only the state department and its policies and procedures. that s what this investigation is about. it will not deal with the pentagon whatsoever. i am confident it will not deal with the white house. that s just the reality of what we are dealing with it. there should be a benefit to improve the state department procedures. this siv process was too cumbersome. the congress was trying to make
first of all, sir, thank you for your personal service in our military and thanks for the service of your family members. we remain grateful. on the issue of evacuating american citizens and siv holders, or siv applicants, this work continues on. we re not finished and we ll make sure that we stay focused on this to get out every american citizen that wants to leave and has the right credentials to be able to leave. on the issue of the security at the airport, it was my assessment and i remain convinced of this, that the risk to mission and risk to force was beyond significant and had we stayed there much longer, we would have endured continued attacks by isis-k and potentially the taliban.
really a state department call. we provided input, as i said in my opening statement, to the state department. their concerns, rightfully, were that, number one, they were being cautioned by the ghani administration, that if they went through american citizens and siv applicants at a pace that was too fast, it would cause a collapse of the government that we were trying to prevent. and so, i think that went into the calculus. and when you add also into the calculus that the siv process was very slow, deliberate, and not very responsive, with your help, we were able to curtail the time that it took to work through that process. but a number of things kind of came together to cause what happened to happen. but again, we provided our
it is really a state department call. we provided input, as i said in my opening statement, to the state department. their concerns rightfully were that number one, they were being cautioned by the ghani administration that if they withdrew american citizens and siv applicants at a pace that was too fast, it would cause a collapse of the government that we were trying to prevent. and so i think that went into the calculus and when you add into the also into the calculus the siv process was at that point very slow, deliberate and not very responsive, with your help we were able to curtail the time that it took to work through that process but a number of things came together to cause what happened to happen.