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Crisis in Afghanistan. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired August 16, 2021 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:00:02]

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining me. I'm Alisyn Camerota. Victor is on assignment today.

President Biden will address the nation this afternoon about the chaos in Afghanistan. The Taliban has seized the majority of the country and replaced the Afghan flag with their own in the presidential palace.

The American Embassy is now completely evacuated. This is video from CNN's team on the ground of Taliban fighters outside of the embassy. In response, the U.S. sending back in thousands of troops to defend the Kabul Airport, where we're seeing frantic scenes like these on your screen. This is civilians flooding the runways desperate for a way out, some people even chasing and clinging to the side of a U.S. military plane amid reports of gunfire there.

After suspending operations for several hours, the U.S. is resuming some flights. Thousands of Americans still need to be evacuated. And CNN is reporting that any Afghans who helped the U.S. in the past 20 years, well, they will have to wait for the moment.

We have got a team of CNN reporters covering the story, some on the ground in Kabul, and all following what has unfolded today.

So let's start with Nick Paton Walsh, who is live for us in Kabul.

Nick, let's start with what's happened at the airport. What is the status of those desperate crowds we saw there?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR: I think it's fair to say they have probably diminished to some degree. They weren't outside the airport in the vast numbers you have seen in some of those images there.

The Taliban, were when we arrived at the -- essentially the entry to the airport doing a job of pushing people away, often firing in the air, telling people to move back, a difficult task though, essentially, because at any given gate, any given opportunity, people were simply trying to rush in wherever they could. I saw one man trying to climb over one of the walls into the airport to absolute chaos. And the streets, too, they're often full of people who simply chosen to try and walk to try and walk to try get near the airports.

But startling to see the U.S.' enemy for 20 years simply doing the ground control to stop people from getting in to that particular airport, some might say because they consider these people disloyal to what's happening here in Kabul and maybe had worked for the previous government but remarkable still that they were sort of providing that perimeter security almost for the American evacuation.

Still, though, not a comforting standoff in the slightest, the U.S. opening fire, killing, they say, two Afghans they say were armed, although they have later seem to suggest that they weren't, in fact, Taliban, as early reports had suggested.

Just in the last hours, quite far from where I -- I heard quite a lot of what sounded like exchanges of gunfire, probably from the direction of the airport. Very hard to know, frankly, what is happening there.

But you have this extraordinary moment where the Taliban are pretty much on the roads all the way up to the last part of Afghanistan that the United States has control of. And that's that airport. More troops coming in. The sound of air movements above. We have seen some helicopters fire off flares.

But I'm not hearing the volume of cargo planes that I did last nigh, so unclear quite how flight operations are continuing there now, but a startling day here in Kabul -- Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Nick, it is so helpful to have you on the ground for us in Kabul to tell us what's really happening.

Here in the U.S., it appears that people, even administration, White House, the president, have been surprised by how fast the situation deteriorated once the withdrawal of the U.S. sped up.

Are people in Kabul surprised by the deterioration?

WALSH: I think you have to understand that, essentially, when the Taliban moved in here, there's a choice between a lengthy series of street battles over months in which it was probably likely eventually the Taliban would somehow prevail. Somehow, they managed to go through all the other cities that were key in Afghanistan, or what happened instead, which was the Afghan security forces crumbling and the Taliban coming in without pretty much a fight.

They have been clashes, possibly, in some areas, reports of dozens of wounded certainly, but not that kind of street-to-street intense conflict that many had feared could have happened. So while I think for some who've lived in Kabul and worked with the government here, there's far from a sense of relief. There is something possibly in the speed in which things have happened here that at least has avoided some degree of bloodshed. But it is, I have to say, absolutely staggering how a city of six million, the place where all the guns, all the money were sort of stacked up during 20 years of the United States backing the government here crumbled so fast.

I did not believe last night when we looked out of one of our terraces and look down the street below and I saw the Taliban flags simply in one of the streets near where we are, startling, frankly, and even more startling today, after only ever really seeing the Taliban when you're on embed with U.S. military as somebody distant in the forests or hills walking straight through the streets here unimpeded carrying their weapons.

[14:05:01]

I must say, calm and some degree of order, frankly, as well. I can't speak for every inch of the city, but where we were on the central streets, traffic cops even in evidence -- Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Nick, it's interesting to hear you say that there's calm and order even as you see the Taliban parading down the street with their weapons.

Who's calling the shots there? Who is in charge in Kabul or Afghanistan right now?

WALSH: Yes, I mean, that is not an easy question to answer. It's definitely not former President Ashraf Ghani.

We don't even know where he is, in fact. And we had a Facebook statement from him after he, unannounced, fled the country. Quite likely the Taliban hierarchy are in charge, obviously, because of the scale of their forces in the capital and elsewhere in the country.

But they haven't necessarily specified who's going to take over sort of the reins of their movement here. We may hear something from that possibly in the days ahead, suggestions that maybe the son of the founder of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, younger man, Mullah Yaqoob, might possibly take that role.

Unclear at this point, because so much of the leadership of the Taliban since the death of Mullah Omar has sort of existed in the shadows with doubts over quite where they were or what state of health they were necessarily in.

That's a key thing, though, for the Taliban, because there's obviously a desire amongst them in the statements they have made saying that journalists, foreigners here, diplomats should be kept safe, should be assured of their security here, that they want to try and encourage some degree of international respectability.

Some have always in the United States believed that, actually, the Taliban accepted the power -- brief spell of power in the '90s as a pariah was a mistake. So we have also heard, too, from two key figures in the previous government and governments, Hamid Karzai, the president before former President Ashraf Ghani, and Ashraf Ghani, sort of co-leader of the government, Abdullah Abdullah.

They released a message today in which they said they were sort of -- a paraphrase here -- but encouraged by how the Taliban were looking to create a kind of inclusive government.

So signals being given off certainly of a broader church of the Taliban here, but we simply don't know who's going to lead it and what we're going to see in the months ahead as they consolidate power and begin to deal with an international reaction after so many warnings from international bodies that, if they seized power by force, they would probably not get recognized or much internationally.

The Taliban might argue they didn't need to use force in Kabul because they simply walked in. But I imagine we will hear some pretty stern words from President Joe Biden in the hours ahead.

CAMEROTA: Nick Paton Walsh, thank you very much for your reporting from Kabul for us.

So let's discuss the U.S. response with CNN's Kaitlan Collins at the White House and Barbara Starr at the Pentagon.

So, Kaitlan, just a short time ago, President Biden returned to the White House, where he will address the nation in the next hour on the situation that we're watching unfold in Afghanistan.

So do you have any sense of what he will say and how he and the White House were caught so unaware?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, the White House has been trying to push back on the idea that President Biden has made the wrong decision here when it comes to withdrawal. They're defending it overall, but I think a lot of the questions in the scrutiny on the White House right now on how this went down and how this happened, and how this morning, clearly, the airport in Kabul is not secure.

It's the only way to get people out of Afghanistan right now. And you have seen what's happening not just on the ground there when it comes to people clinging to those planes as they are taking off, but also the idea that there are still so many people there that the U.S. needs to get out, not just U.S. civilians, our U.S. personnel, but also those Afghans who have stood by the U.S.' side for the better part of two decades helping them and are, of course, now clearly targets of the Taliban, given how quickly everything deteriorated over the weekend.

And that is one thing that the White House's top national security advisers have bluntly admitted this morning, which is that they are surprised by how quickly the Taliban was able to take over, not just in Afghanistan, but also with Kabul yesterday.

And they're putting a lot of that blame on the Afghan security forces, which President Biden was telling us just six weeks ago he believed they were equipped and trained enough to fight back against the Taliban. It's not clear for how long, but, of course, they believed it was going to be longer than what transpired.

But I think a lot of questions that are going through facing the president is why he had that thought and why they were not better briefed on the lack of will on behalf of the Afghan security forces to push back on the Taliban, but also why President Biden made that claim that it was -- quote -- "highly unlikely" that the Taliban was going to overrun everything and be running things in Afghanistan in the way that we are seeing happening right now, as Nick just laid out there in his report.

So those are big questions facing the White House about how this withdrawal has happened and, of course, what's to come over the next 24 to 48 hours, because one thing that we have seen is, President Biden has authorized the deployment of thousands of troops there to try to get this airport under control, which clearly, as of just a few hours ago, it was not.

[14:10:00]

And so a lot of questions that are facing the president, and that is why he returned from Camp David, where he had been monitoring the situation from over the weekend to make his first public remarks on this since the government of Afghanistan collapsed and collapsed quickly.

CAMEROTA: Barbara Starr, what about that? What about the questions that Kaitlan raises in terms of why the president had the impression that the Afghan security forces were going to be able to be equipped enough and mentally prepared enough and trained enough to hold off the Taliban?

Does the Pentagon have any ideas on what went wrong there?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think they have all parsed their words very carefully in recent weeks, Alisyn.

The word you kept hearing was capacity, that they had the capacity to fight. But going back several weeks, the questions were quietly being raised about whether in fact they had the will to fight.

Afghan security forces were a deeply troubled organization, starting from the top. Afghanistan, there is no question, was a government rife with corruption. That meant troops weren't getting paid, troops weren't getting food. They weren't getting resupplied. They weren't getting time off from being out in the field to go home and see their families.

When the Taliban attacked, they weren't getting the air support sometimes and the other support that they needed. And without the U.S. there to sort of back them up, the will pretty much ebbed away.

And I think that that has become the fundamental issue, that disconnect between capacity and capability and will to fight -- Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Barbara, another follow-up question to you. The troops were withdrawing. As we know, that's something that President Trump, a deal that President Trump made with the Taliban. Now troops are having to go back in, thousands of additional troops are going back in to secure all of this. And somehow, over the weekend, or I think maybe even this morning, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan suggested, well, there was always this contingency plan, if need be.

Is that the how the Pentagon sees it?

STARR: Well, look, there's contingency plans and contingency plans.

There were plans when they started withdrawing the original 2, 500 troops, if they came under attack, if they had to get Americans out. Absolutely, there's always a contingency plan about how you would do it.

But, clearly, the circumstances changed. And the military had to begin reacting very quickly and a little bit on the fly to get troops in and to be able to deal with this. They had rehearsed what to do, a number of scenarios, if they had to evacuate Americans.

But in the last 24, 48 hours, what we -- the world is seeing is these pictures of the Kabul Airport airfield and U.S. aircraft and Afghan citizens deeply at risk. No evacuation plan calls for military aircraft to land in the middle of hundreds, if not thousands of people running on a runway trying to find any way out of the country.

That is not how a military plan works for the U.S. government, make no mistake. So, an awful lot evolved very quickly and the military having to scramble to keep up with it.

CAMEROTA: Barbara Starr, Kaitlan Collins, thank you both very much for all of the reporting.

All right, so we have more on the chaos at Kabul International Airport. There's new video that appears to show bodies falling from a plane. And, of course, the political blame game is now in full swing.

Plus, more heartbreak in Haiti after a deadly earthquake. Now the tropical depression threatens even more devastation.

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[14:17:59]

CAMEROTA: More scenes and chaos at the airport in Kabul to show you.

Some Afghans are so desperate to flee the country and the Taliban that they were hanging on to a moving U.S. military plane. Also, a warning. This next video is even more disturbing. This shows an object, possibly a person, falling from the aircraft just after takeoff.

And you can hear people gasp in horror as they see what could be this body hitting the tarmac. CNN has not been able to confirm that anyone was still clinging to the aircraft when it took off. Joining us now is the former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald

Neumann. He's now the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. And CNN global affairs analyst Kimberly Dozier.

Great to have both of you here.

Kimberly, I just want to start with you.

Was this chaos avoidable? I mean, is this just the chaos that we see that would be inevitable towards having to remove troops and a war coming to an end like this? Or was there something that President Biden should have done?

KIMBERLY DOZIER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: I know that the military as -- even a month ago was planning to send thousands of troops in to secure the airport and secure a pullout of U.S. personnel.

But I don't know if they had the imagination to conceive that the entire city and the entire airport would no longer be in Afghan army control.

But the chaos, when you see a city break down, it goes fast. And what I was hearing is that there was a disagreement between the diplomats, who thought they had at least a month before things went bad, and some people in the intelligence and military community, who thought that this, when it went, it would go as fast as it did, not maybe this fast.

But there's always that chaos factor that you can't plan for. And that's what they're trying to manage right now. The problem is, they're not telling us what happened with that plane.

[14:20:05]

And that is surreal, because Afghans and people around the Middle East and around the Arab world, they have made their mind up. They know what happened with that plane.

CAMEROTA: Ambassador Neumann, I know that you were there in Afghanistan recently.

Are you surprised by what you're seeing today?

RONALD NEUMANN, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO AFGHANISTAN: Yes and no.

In one sense, no, because I warned a month ago that, if the city started falling, the Afghan army might quit quickly. But the roll into Kabul, no, I certainly didn't predict that. So this has clearly gotten ahead of us.

I think what -- this is Monday morning quarterbacking, but the fact is that, a month ago, I and several of my colleagues have written pieces saying that the problem with the Afghan army was as much as anything a morale problem. And if you wanted to cure that, or bolster them up, you needed to add the air support and say that we were going to continue air support after the 31st of October. It was the sense of abandonment by us that reinforced a lot of other

problems. I know the short answer people like to say is the Afghan army quit fighting. But, remember, the Afghan army has been fighting for year when we quit fighting.

The last three years, we have had minimal casualties, in the last year, none. Afghan army was losing thousands. So I think you have to look a little deeper than this kind of bumper sticker phrase about the Afghan army and look at what happened to their morale and what role we played in that.

CAMEROTA: Kimberly, I know it's not that productive to play the blame game. But I do think it's helpful to figure out who mismanaged this.

And so, as you know, President Trump, his administration made a deal with the Taliban to get out in May. President Trump would have done it sooner if he could. And they act as though there were all sorts of plans in place to keep it from devolving, as we have seen.

President Biden says his hands were tied, because President Trump made that deal. But he wanted to get out anyway, as he has said over and over. So which administration is to blame for what we're seeing today?

DOZIER: Wow, that's the toughest question, because the fact of the matter is, for those negotiations in Doha to have worked, you would have needed the Afghan government, the Ghani administration to also be willing to give up some power.

And I heard from U.S. officials and from Afghan officials, why should? We won by an election. And so it just sort of ran out the clock. And the people trying to negotiate a deal and the military trying, the U.S. military trying to hold things together was left with a situation of, OK, we have got two presidents in a row who've lost patience with this place.

We're afraid it's going to all go bad. But we don't have any more arguments to try to keep some people on the ground.

That said, I had talked to so many Biden administration officials who'd said, don't worry, we're never going to go to zero in Afghanistan. Biden doesn't trust the Taliban to handle terrorism. And so they were all shocked to see where we are today.

CAMEROTA: Ambassador, do you have any thoughts on that, which administration did this too precipitously?

NEUMANN: No, I think both.

The Doha deal is not a peace agreement. It's a withdrawal deal. It had specific timelines for us, vague commitments for the Taliban, none of which they have kept. President Ghani did resist that, but then he wasn't part of it. We never made him part of it. So, we pressured him to release 5,000 prisoners, some of whom are on the battlefield and leading some of the attack., so, from his point of view, a thoroughly bad deal. And then we kept with the Afghan -- we pressed the Afghans to stay on

the defensive in the last year as part of our search for peace. So, then you roll it over into Biden, who got a bad deal, but he got a lot of advice to keep a presence, including from all our NATO allies, British, Germans, Italians even, saying we should stay there, and they had more troops than we did.

I think we need to look forward now at our responsibility to get out the -- not just the interpreters, all of those who worked for us. We have a much larger responsibility beyond that to Afghans who bought into us, into our values.

I don't think we can just say, tough cookie, we're out of here now, the rest of you just -- women and others, are just going to have to die. And, right now, there's a strong possibility of that.

CAMEROTA: So, I mean, just very quickly, Ambassador, will we fulfill that promise? Can they trust us?

NEUMANN: I would not trust us if I were an Afghan.

[14:25:01]

We have said we will make the effort on the SIVs. We haven't made any real commitment to anybody beyond that. We have got phony -- I call them phony. We have got this process of priority referrals that gets people into a process that could eventually lead to a visa. But they have to get out of Afghanistan for that process to start working.

And they may have to sustain themselves up to a year while it works, with no guarantee of the outcome. People have no way of doing that. So this is a kind of totally phony process. Now we're -- we seem to be more willing now. We're bringing up lists of people who I think get into that -- these P categories.

But whether we're going to stay there long enough and make the commitment to get them out, I have no idea. And, so far, the administration is not speaking. It's not explaining what it's going to do. It's not explaining how it's going to get the airport reopened. It's got to get it reopened and get commercial flights in there as well, or you're still going to be mobbed by Afghans.

CAMEROTA: Maybe we will hear that from the president one hour from now.

Kim Dozier, Ambassador Ronald Neumann, we really appreciate your expertise.

DOZIER: Thank you.

NEUMANN: Many thanks.

CAMEROTA: A new book from legendary journalist Bob Woodward is set to be released in just weeks.

What it reveals about the tumultuous time between Donald Trump's election loss, the January 6 insurrection, and Joe Biden's inauguration.

We have exclusive new details on that ahead.

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