afghanistan decision making. first upon coming into office, how did the biden administration assess the impact on the the ground of president trump s flawed deal with the taliban. did the administration attempt to negotiate better terms with the taliban upon coming into office? second, did the president s april withdrawal announcement set in motion any contingency planning in the event that the taliban rapidly took over the country? what was the plan to evacuate all americans? what was plan to evacuate sivs, p-1, and p-2s and other at-risk groups and staff and those affiliated with radio free europe, voice of america, the national endowment for democracy and other u.s. funded organizations. president trump s with steven miller intentionally blocked sieves from being processed. which i think is a barbaric and cruel decision which likely resulted in death for some u.s.
so the siv numbers, that we re tabulating right now because we re trying to account for every one who has come in. some people remain in transit countries. other people are now in the united states. we re putting all of those numbers together to determine the overwhelming majority of afghans who have come out of afghanistan thanks to our evacuation efforts are in one way or another afghans at risk. some will be siv applicants and others will be p-1 or p-2 or afghans at risk. we re breaking down the numbers and we should have a break down in the next couple of weeks. thank you. looking forward to seeing that. mr. rubio. in your statement i think the most troubling thing is the following quote, even the most pessimistic assess. did not predict the government forces in kabul would collapse while u.s. forces remained and you also cite general milley who said there was no indication that there would be a rapid collapse of the afghan army and
0 so i thank you very much for the way that you have kept us engaged and informed as decisions have been made. as as you pointed out, the biden administration was dealt a very difficult hand on the withdrawal from afghanistan. we all recognized we needed to withdrawal the options were extremely limited. the mistakes made by previous administrations, we ve talked about it, but i think we need to understand that many of us did not support the 2002 campaign to go into iraq. and one of those reasons was that we wanted to complete the mission in afghanistan when we had the 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 finished afghanistan. a mistake made by the bush administration. and we ve already talked about the trump administration and setting a deadline and releasing prisoners and moving forward with the reduction of troops. when there