2500. a minute ago you said 5,000. it depends on the situation. if you re talking about a situation where you re not fighting the taliban and you have the full assistance of the afghanistan government or the taliban s attacks against you are a minimum, you can hold it at 2500. if you pause it that you re in afghanistan, say, beyond august 31st without the tacet agreement of the taliban and without the assistance of the government of afghanistan who provided most of the physical security at bagram, then you have to put a big footprint in as we did at hki. the two situations are analogous. time has expired. gentlemen, thank you for your testimony. before i go any further, i want to acknowledge an extraordinary effort and successful effort made by the u.s. military, particularly the air force and
0 during this process, the views of all of the joint chiefs of staff, all of us, the centcom commander, general mckenzie, general miller, and myself were all given serious consideration by the administration. we provided a broad range of options and our assessment of their potential outcomes. we couched that in cost, benefit, risk-to-force, risk-to-mission. all of that was evaluated against the national security objectives of the united states. on 14 april, the president of the united states, president biden, announced his decision, and the u.s. military received a change of mission, to retrograde all u.s. military forces, maintain a small contingency force of 6 to 700 to protect the embassy in kabul, until the department of state could coordinate contractor security support, and also to assist turkey to maintain the hamid karzai international airport and to transition the u.s. mission to over the horizon counterterrorism sport and security force systems. it is clear, it is obvious to
mccaul. congressman, welcome back to fox news sunday . thanks for having me, chris. chris: on friday secretary of state blinken under questioning from reporters refused to say how many americans, how many afghan allies have gotten out of that country since the u.s. pulled all our forces out on monday. as the top republican on the house foreign affairs committee, do you know the answer to that? i ve been given the answer in the classified space, but it is in the hundreds. we have hundreds of american citizens left behind enemy lines in afghanistan as i speak. and also very sadly, the interpreters who worked with our special forces, almost all of them were left behind and were not let in the gates at the airport at hki to get out. that was a promise that the president made. i said all along this president has blood on his hands. this week, this last week, we had 13 service men and women