saying they are trying to get more than just what berasso said was excused from the secretary of state yesterday. we re also learning that the committee wanted to hear from the defense secretary today. but that they were rebuffed and he will not attend this hearing today andin steted they were trg to determine what has happening on ground and the state department and instead they ll zwruf just hear from the secretary of state. that frustrating some going into the meeting. and one of the things that the democrats are very careful of. even though they have tough questions, they want to make it clear this wasn t just the biden administration handling afghanistan. this is 20 years of a conflict in this country and as one aide put it to me, they re not going to let the republicans put this entire conflict at the feet of the biden administration. erica and jim. lauren fox, thank you. we re seeing secretary blinken
was in its strongest military position since 9/11. and we have the smallest number of u.s. forces in afghanistan since 2001. as a result, upon taking office, president biden immediately faced the choice between ending the war or escalating it. had he not followed through on his predecessor s commitment, attacks on our forces and those of our allies would have resumed and the taliban s nationwide assault on afghanistan s major cities would have commenced. that would have required sending substantially more u.s. forces into afghanistan to defend ourselves and to prevent a taliban takeover. taking casualties, and with at best the prospect of restoring a stalemate and remaining stuck in afghanistan under fire indefinitely. there is no evidence that staying longer would have made the afghan security forces or the afghan government any more resilient or self-sustaining.
to demand the taliban abide by commitments now expect a different result i think is somewhat absurd. the taliban rules afghanistan so we ll have to deal with it in some form. but let s not kid ourselves. there is no such thing as a reformed taliban. this group is woefully stuck in the 14th century with no will to come out. their concept of political representation and legitimacy is based squarely on the the use of violent force and intimidation. the administration said we should jum the taliban by their actions and agree. and their actions since taking over afghanistan has been pretty horrifying. beating women activists, murdering ethnic and religious minorities such as the hasar, separating classrooms by gender, shutting down local media, reeve fusal to break with al qaeda, appointing the head of a foreign terrorist organization as designated by our government fro
this is secretary ant tony blinken about to begin his testimony on afghanistan. you ll hear the introduction in the background. let s have a listin. it took me into a room and tied my hands with a scarf and started beating with me a cable. horror he experienced was hard to fathom. he described being covered in blood after being severely beaten and saw taliban militants abusing prisoners. one of the colleagues said they were mocking us and saying, you want freedom? what freedom. this is not the taliban of 2001. this happened last week. amid the extensive over sight work plans in afghanistan, we must not lose sight of the courageous women that continue to protest in the streets calling for freedom in the face of violence and threats. a repression of the afghan people is happening in realtime and the world must bear witness and hold the taliban
these new u.s. government-led efforts how, how coordination with outside groups and individuals being handled by who, what is the nature of the state d.o.d. cooperation, give us a sense of that. sure. we have within the department led by our former ambassador to afghanistan john bass who went back to kabul to the airport to help lead the evacuation efforts. he is leading an effort to manage, coordinate all of the ongoing efforts to bring people who wish to leave afghanistan out and that includes among other things a coordination with the many outside groups as well as members of congress who are working themselves heroically to help in this effort. i met myself with about 75 veterans organizations a couple of weeks ago, given the extraordinary efforts that veterans either individually or as groups are doing to help and we want to make sure that we are