atia, you say that people feel betrayed by the american withdrawal. they feel terribly betrayed. i spoke to one woman who was a doctor in france. she was an afghan refugee for 20+ years and decided to give up her job and go back to afghanistan in 2001 and work to help build the country. she worked for the u.n. and i m not even going to mention the organization that she works for because it could get her in trouble, but she is the head of that organization, and when i called her she used to be the happiest person when i would talk to her with so much hope. she loved america and she came to america to study and further her education. when i spoke to her i had never heard her cry before. she broke down in tears, and she said why did they betray us like that? they promised they would continue to help us. they said they were our friend, and i had no response to her.
written so much about the country. atia, i know you are hearing desperate pleas from people well beyond the translators and the military the military drivers and others who have some ability to get to the state department and get on that list, but the women and the others who are being targeted for their human rights efforts and for just being women, what do you think of the taliban s promises today that women can be in government as long as they obey sharia law? they ve made many promises that they ve broken in the past. time will tell if they will keep these promises, but if history has taught us anything about the taliban regime including in 1991 they came in promising to protect the people from the brutal civil war prior to the taliban regime and from 96 to 2001 that drastically changed. that drastically changed.
succeed, and that second plan needs to be not just americans, first and foremost, of course, not just the afghans that work for the united states government, but all of the people that you were just talking about with your previous guest because president biden said yesterday that it was a mistake to build democracy and state build, maybe that s his view and there are literally tens of thousands of afghans that believed in that common mission and worked with american ngos and took american money to build schools, to build programs to work as journalists in that mission whose lives are now in danger. the way you correct for the first failure of the implementation plan is to have that implementation plan succeed mow matter what the cost, in my view. michael, that s exactly what president and laura bush were saying in their extraordinary statement. rare for them to have a joint statement that is anything other than honoring say the passing of some revered friend or foreign
for effectively not even putting up a fight in these circumstances here. so the question now for the president is can he find some way out of this? can they, in this limited military effort get as many of those americans out and are they willing to expand the perimeter and what will they do to secure safe passage for those afghans and americans outside of kabul? we ve heard among other, president j. bush expressing great sadness about the situation in afghanistan right now and more notably calling on the u.s. government and calling on the biden administration to cut the red tape, to erase all of the bureaucracy and to get out, to provide safe and secure passage to all of those afghans who helped the united states in the past, andrea? that brings me to atia abbawi, former colleague, friend and author who has spent so many years in kabul for nbc and has