Efforts in recent hours and now this. i mean, it s causing casualties, causing chaos. stopping the evacuation mission. this is the kind of thing that isis would want to do. and it is consistent with a threat stream of what they were hoping and planning to try to carry out in recent days, geoff. let s expand on that a bit with nbc s andrea mitchell, who is on the phone. you have the best intell and diplomatic sources in washington. what are you hearing about the possibility that courtney laid out, that this could be isis-k trying to disrupt this effort here? reporter: exactly. you re exactly right. two u.s. intelligence officials telling me they have no precise tricks yet for today s ied attack but their assumption, best information is that it was, indeed, caused by isis-k. this say splinter isis group that is considered an adversary
0 there in afghanistan. we continue our coverage right now. let s toss it over to garrett haake. garrett? chris jansing, thank you. i m garrett haake. there has been an explosion outside the kabul airport. you re looking at live pictures of the airport. it s 6:30 in the evening tonight. pentagon says casualties are still unclear at this point. we know that the president has been briefed on the explosion. he was in a preplanned national security meeting this morning. white house officials are huddling as we speak. we hope to learn more from them soon. the airport has been under a terror threat all morning. this was going to our top story even before this attack. so, americans have been told to leave the airport gates and to stay away. all of this is happening as the pentagon is set to give an update in the next 30 minutes. we ll see if that remains on schedule and we ll bring it to you live when it happens. meantime we ll try to stay on top of this with our reporters. courtney kube is
Expected at first. and then we didn t really pay as close attention to the intell as we should have about how difficult that was proving to be. time for about 1 1/2 more questions to you. i want to ask you to your reaction to something president biden said in his abc news interview. listen to the president here. the idea that somehow there s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, i don t know how that happens. i don t know how that happened. so for you, that was always priced into the decision? yes. so taking into account everything you said about how challenging the security environment is and was always going to be there, do you agree with the president? was the chaos we all watched over the last five or six days unavoidable? yes and no. i think it is absolutely true that it was never going to be easy, and it was never going to be painless. i think the president is right about that. but where i think he s wrong is
Starts with, can you, the answer is always going to be yes. sure. that s the way they re trained. you want me to take that hill, i m going to take it. whatever you ask me to do, i m going to find a way to get done. fine. that s where the civilians have to step in and say appreciate that, respect your capability and where you re coming from, but we civilians are ultimately the ones who have to make the decisions and we look at this and see it differently as a result. so i often times hear people say, well, why do politicians not just do what the generals say? well, this is the balance that is supposed to be struck between their very specific military skill and the broader political decision about what needs to be done based on the intell. and i do think we didn t we weren t as hard on that intell as we should have been. so, to that end, when the pentagon said yesterday when you have secretary austin that the military doesn t have the capability to go out into the country in afgh
Alternative. and that s what we struggled with for 15 years, trying to build up that alternative. a competent, you know i don t want to say noncorrupt but certainly less corrupt government that could actually lead afghanistan. and that s what wasn t there. and i think the intell was there, telling us that. and the biden administration should have heeded that more and should have been more prepared for what happened as a result. is this the case of the pentagon, department of defense, not just under this administration but going back the last 20 years, to borrow a phrase, grading their own homework? the pentagon goes in, saying we re going to train the military. they turn around and say yep, there we go. we ve got a military, we ve got 300,000 people? yeah. this may seem like a tangent. but this is why civilian control of the military is so important. i don t blame the military for the way they approach this. what i ll say about the military is you ask them a question that