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flying out to third party countries. and also looking for other places to fly some of these evacuees. that is what led to a pause. the white house described it as a brief pause. our clarissa ward and team on the ground in kabul described this as an eight-hour delay. hardly a brief pause. it gives you a sense of how difficult this process is to bring people in, fly them to the countries and process them. that caused a bit of a backup. a significant backup, actually, but the white house is saying that president biden will announce that the flights are resuming. they will resume. the order has been give ton start the flights up again. but the question here is is the state department, is this government bureaucracy working as fast as it needs to here? that s one thing on the minds of officials here at the white house as they ve been meeting with the president and others, trying to get some of this backlog unjammed, if you will. that s been a challenge of the morning. this i ....
thousands are holding out home stuck outside of the walls of kabul airport waiting with no guarantee they ll be able to be safely evacuated, in a new interview, he is defending his call to pull off troops from afghanistan. you don t think this could have been handled better in any way, no mistakes? no. i don t think it could have been handled in a way that we re going to go back in hindsight and look and to think that there is a way to get out without chaosen chaosenuing, you don t know how that happens. even if americans and our afghan allies are still trying to get out, they re going to leave. we re going to do everything in our power to get all americans and our allies out. does that means troops will stay beyond august 31st if necessary. if depends on where we are and whether we could ramp the numbers up to 5,000 to $7,000 a day coming out. if that is the case, they ll all be out. because we have like 10 to 15,000 americans in the country right now, ....
to expand the perimeter around the airport so there is more safe zone for people waiting in line and if there have been what is the taliban s response. so the think the commander on the ground the airfield is secure and every day in security operations commanders are always what we call improving the security environment. so as the commander on the ground at every level, finds those things that need to be improved to increase the security to allow mission success, they re going to do those things that they have those authorities to do on a daily basis. so i think as you saw today, the ability to continue state departments and the ability to bring more people on and to continue those, that is what we ll continue to look at over the next few days. do they have the ability to zpand expand the perimeter around the airport. i don t want to get ahead of where we are. the mission remains security at the airport and inside of the perimeter of the airport and that is what ....
processed and ready to fly. maybe to expand the perimeter around the airport and the commander on the ground the airfield is secure. every day if security operations commanders are always what we can improving the security environment. so as the commander on the ground at every level finds those things that need to be improved to increase the security to allow mission success, they are going to do those things they have the authorities to do on a daily basis. so i think as you saw today the ability to continue state department afwoilt bring more people on and to continue those that s what we ll continue to look at over the next few days. do they have the ability to expand the perimeter around the airport? i don t want to get ahead of where we are. the mission remains security at the airport and inside the perimeter of the airport and that s what we re doing. there are, as we speak, there is no plans to expand beyond that. i think we leave it at that. the other ....
tell us where we are in terms of both getting u.s. military personnel into the country and the evacuations getting folks out. . reporter: so the pace has really stepped up. look back to where evacuations ground to a halt. they could not get troops in, people out. operations have been flowing for several days and now getting up wards of 20 flights in and out every day, every 24 hours. so nearly one an hour. they re moving hundreds of people. the big problem continues to be getting these people to the airport safely. so, what we know and i ll set this up for our viewers. the airport has two sides, civilian side and the military side. right now, the taliban have checkpoints that are really surrounding both sides of the airport. the u.s. military has been in touch, in direct talks really, with the taliban there on the ground. these sort of technical talks where they discuss things like the situation under which they will allow americans through these checkpoints. but a ....