in studio with me pete hegseth. when you are deliberately vague with the numbers of americans on the ground behind enemy lines, what does that communicate to you? it communicates to me in all fairness they don t know. the chaos is what is in control right now there. the scary part in all the reporting we re getting and i look forward to hearing what the senator has to say as well. the taliban probably has a better sense of how many americans and siv applicants are on the ground. the other admission is we re relying on the taliban for crowd control outside. he didn t want the talk about that at all. a detack tow admission of that. they control the roads and the checkpoints. at every checkpoint you are showing a passport or visa which means they know who is trying to get there before they actually get there. combine that with lists of others who worked with us who have fallen into their hands it is scary how much they probably know who is clamoring to get to the airport and we don t ha
0 require constant coordination and deconfliction with the taliban. it is absolutely requiring us to keep these lines of communication with the taliban open that have checkpoints beyond the airport. we have seen this coordination has worked well in terms of allowing access and flow to continue. one of our commanders used helicopters to bring people in because of the crowd size. crowd size matters, too, and that s what the president was referring to. i have two questions. i would like to go back to the incident. can you be a little more specific and tell us if you can rule out the attackers were the taliban first. i would like to go back to the deadline. the french foreign minister said today that it s quote, necessary to continue the afghanistan evacuation beyond august 31. can t rule out who the hostile actor was in the incident last night. central command s statement referred to it as a hostile actor. we don t know more than that. this just happened. i don t know when we ll have