tropical storm idaho has formed in the caribbean tonight, the ninth named storm of the season is forecasted to slam into the gulf coast this weekend as potentially a major hurricane. sunday march the 16th anniversary of hurricane katrina s landfall. the chaotic u.s. withdrawal from afghanistan is drawing increasing criticism from veterans of the war on terror and that was before today s deadly bombings in kabul. let s bring in someone with a unique position to address the concerns of former military, former navy lieutenant commander and pilot, republican congress men from california, mike garcia. congressman, great to have you with us. thanks, shannon, thanks for having me. shannon: one of the things that we keep trying to figure out is the decision to get rid of it or leave it undefended. i want to read something from andy mccarthy writing at national review. he said by not just slashing the in country troop presence but surrendering bagram and in a consciously chaotic and sneaky
this is that the president decided early on that this was going to beautiful medic mission is that a military operation. he allowed the department of state to run this without support from the department of defense and secretary you can t hide it with that mind-set, you start think of things like i don t want too many troops on that airfield to secure it and hold it for long enough and i got a feeling as this president gave orders or gave a dictate that said basically hey, look, i don t want a certain number of troops in bagram and when that was communicated, the department of defense and the secretary said with that number of troops we can t hold bagram. at that point i think that apartment state and biden decided that they didn t need bagram and then they can proceed with this mission. he keeps referring to it as a mission and it s absolutely got the wrong mission statement as a result and we bobby slid got the terrible strategy and tactics that fall out from there. so this is a mi
because it was the most secure base that you could have. the most defendable, multi-runway airport, we could have removed thousands of people in there. i see the president is now saying we moved out 100,000 people in his press secretary just a few days ago said i think it was three days ago, we had moved out 11,000. so if we only moved out 11,000 in one day, i don t know how i mean, it s all most impossible with a number of aircraft that were going out that we could have moved 100,000 people out. shannon: we are going to talk about bagram a little bit more coming up and about how that factors in here and the decision to let it go. in the meantime, mark and jake, we thank you both for being among the bravest and the best who have gone to that region and done what you did voluntarily to protect the rest of us and to fight for freedom, thank you both very much. thank you, shannon and god bless. shannon: you too buried much more reaction to the attack in afghanistan and here in w
magnitude, but bagram is going to be one of the most causal factors in this as we look at the forensics. shannon: it feels like a bitter, devastating pill to swallow today with the loss of these service members and many, many other people, afghan civilians, dozens more wounded, so with that in mind, is it possible you think you talk about how this has been set up with the state department in more of a diplomatic effort, willis that administration potentially pivot? do you think that there are those close to the president or him watching how this is playing out with his own eyes who will say all right, we can correct course, we can make better of a bad situation at this point? no, he s not listening to anyone. i m part of the four country caucus, which is a bipartisan group of about 25 veterans who served, most of us in the middle east, iraq and afghanistan, basically pleading with him to revoke the 8/31 date but also the mission of getting americans out to getting all americans a
and steadily losing their u.s.-dependent capacity to function, the biden administration agreed there would be no turning back from the decision to pull out a matter how bad things got, u.s. commanders would have no military options. as somebody who knows firsthand how critical it is to have places to land or planes, to take off, what you make of this decision about bagram? this is the linchpin that caused things to fall apart. there s no doubt. there was a lot of errors made, the pulling out of military personnel before civilians and our afghan allies, leaving behind military equipment, significant military equipment without a proper turn over to our partners, believing bagram airfield in the dead of the night i think about two in the morning without really notifying our partners there within the afghan government as well as the folks on the ground that will prove out to be one of the most critical mistakes, and it s actually tied, in my opinion, to the absolute, most critical causal