negotiator, it just kind of washes over you. even members of congress who i ve never seen, they can t get booked on cable. they were more compelling than anthony lincoln but that s the strategy, worried to death while everyone else dies. one of the things that antony blinken said in his opening statement is, he basically kept saying, if we had stayed longer, it wasn t like the afghan army wasn t going to be able to sustain but that wasn t really the question. they are trying to focus on the idea that americans want out of afghanistan, and that s not the point. also let s not forget that president biden in july said that there is no way that the afghan army is going to get run over and the taliban will take over the country and here we are. so when he throws up his hands and says, we didn t know this is going to happen, nobody knew.
not to realize the afghan army wasn t equipped to fight. how demoralizing is it to those for nation building that after 20 years and all the weapons and all the training that they still chose not to fight? we had 300,000 supposedly between the poils and the army and 300,000 melted away? probably not more than 10,000 taliban in any one place and they threw down their arms? this is an indictment of nation building. we should learn not to do it again. bill: we have a mess on our hands now. senator rand paul, thank you for your time back in the state of kentucky. dana: we ll head back to house republicans on capitol hill. the country working with the afghan army serving honorably. if there was going to be a pull-out of the country we should have gotten every american out first. should have worked to get all of our allies out helping men
if he hadn t, we would have had to add troops. did he have a better option? better i don t know, but that s what the other option was. we have seen reporting of the white house and administration officials that thought that look, this was going to happen anyway, the taliban were going to either fight or walk their way into kabul, and the amount of troops trump left in kabul wasn t enough to do anything. it would take another 10,000. we reported two years ago, talked to senior commanders, asked that question. what s the minimum number of u.s. troops we need in the country to do the minimum counterterrorism mission, not fight a war, to do minimum number and to continue the job of advising and assisting the army there and to continue to train and equip them. the number was always between 8 and 10,000. as soon as trump went below that a few years ago, it was a different ball game.
changing the calculation by the moment. what we have heard is from senior officials. yesterday we saw the secretary of state, tony blinken on the sunday shows, saw jake sullivan today doing a lot of morning television shows, all making the same point. one, yes, conceding the speed and scale of the taliban takeover of afghanistan surprised them, but two, that they really were left with very few palatable political options here in terms of the u.s. strategy going forward in afghanistan, because they inherited a deal as they put it from the trump administration with the taliban that laid ground work for the u.s. departure. here is jake sullivan explaining what it would have meant to reverse that agreement. i think the worst case scenario for the united states would be a circumstance in which we were adding back in thousands and thousands of troops to fight and die in a civil war in afghanistan when the afghan army wasn t prepared to fight itself. that was the alternative choice