afghanistan to stand clear of the gates and so forth. we still have resident intelligence sources required to begin to press back, to begin to fight back, as we lead afghanistan, our ability to strike based on that intelligence will be made much more difficult, but i think even as general mckenzie, the central command commander admitted difficult but not impossible. a couple things i m hearing from you here. when we were listening to genal mckenzie yesterday, he said the threat is persistent of another attack and my own sources in nato said there are more attacks to come, the likelihood is fairly high at this very moment. do we have the capacity to protect against those attacks? are you confident especially when to a certain extent we are currently relying on the taliban? we can t protect perfectly, no. and we have to appreciate the nature of this terrorist target,
will you help. do they have even that power at this point, the united states? yes, we have a lot of leverage if we want to use it. it s a decision of balancing risk with our strategic objectives. i think we have leverage we can tell the taliban we expect better control over the situation. we can tell the taliban they won t receive any international assistance going forward if they don t not only cooperate with our efforts to get people out of the way now or the next couple of days or extend the deadline but in addition to that after the u.s. and the international military forces have left, ngos will remain. there s going to be an international refugee crisis in the region and a lot of hunger. people don t talk about the actual problems in afghanistan. there are people right now who are not being, their needs are not being, the basic needs are not being met and the
out of harm s way. ken talked about the taliban and the need to negotiate with them. we have no choice. the reality is that the taliban, they re going to face a lot of challenges. there will be continued civil war at some level in afghanistan. the taliban does not control the territory. go ahead. ken did touch on the power struggle on what s happening in afghanistan. you have the taliban which is the overarching power. you have al qaeda that could want to regain power in the region. is this an opportunity for the united states to hold the taliban accountable? you made a mistake and promised us security for the airport. that didn t happen. our men and women died as a result of your mistakes. now we ll get every american back out and when we come back to find the people responsible,
remaining hours of this evacuation. afghan civilians are still coming in small groups to hamid karzai swer national airport. they know what happens at the gates of those airports, that airport yesterday, but they are still coming because they are so eager to get out of an afghanistan that is run by the taliban. the u.s. military is continuing to evacuate those small groups of afghan civilians, the allies for the most part have ended their civilian evacuations, the canadians, the germans had their last flights yesterday. the uk has its last flight today, the focus now is on getting their militaries out ahead of president biden s august 31 deadline but as you can imagine, this is happening under a very heightened security presence, the threats are myriad. there is real concern about a repeat of yesterday s suicide bombing, or potentially even rockets being fired at those remaining aircraft taking off.
right? you have massive, thousands of afghan civilians crowded against just a few entry points to the airport, so this is a target that is fixed, and very, very vulnerable, and then you have an attacker in isis-k as your previous report revealed, which is at war with both us but also the taliban, so this makes it an extremely lucrative target for isis-k and a target that will persist as long as the conditions persist so long as those people crowd against the airport, frankly as long as the evacuation continues, giving them cause to get to the airport, this will be a vulnerability. there s another point you brought up, you talked about intelligence. we can talk about the technology that we have for intelligence in afghanistan that we ll continue to use likely in that country but nonetheless, much of the intelligence that the u.s. government bases its decision on is human intelligence. what if the united states pulls