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Crisis in Afghanistan. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired August 16, 2021 - 15:00   ET

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

[15:01:32]

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: It is just after the top of the hour. I'm Alisyn Camerota.

And President Biden will speak to the world this hour, as Afghanistan falls under Taliban control and we see civilians desperately trying to evacuate. So we will bring you the president's remarks live.

This is video we're about to show you from CNN's team in Kabul of Taliban fighters outside of the American Embassy today. The embassy has been completely evacuated, the U.S. sending back in thousands of troops to defend the airport now in Kabul, as civilians have been flooding the runways desperate for a flight out.

Some people even chasing and clinging to the side of a moving U.S. military plane, as you can see here. And we have this very disturbing video to show you. It appears to show an object, it's possibly a person falling from the aircraft just after takeoff. You can hear people gasp in horror, but CNN has not been able to confirm that anyone was still clinging to the aircraft when it took off.

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

And, Nick, I know you spent some time at the airport earlier today. And we have heard from Pentagon officials that their plan is to evacuate 1,000 people a day from that Kabul Airport. From what you have seen and the chaos that we have seen there today, will that be possible?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR: Difficult to imagine how they could achieve a goal like that without some sort of cooperation from the Taliban, oddly, and some kind of agreement the Taliban will allow the very people who have been assisting the Afghan government here that they have just removed and the U.S. presence here to escape the country.

I mean, we saw today utter chaos. Essentially, my answer is, no, I think it'd be very hard to pull that operation off. To be honest, when they first announced the idea of bringing tens of thousands of people out of the country, it seemed farfetched even if the Afghan government was in control because of the chaos that can sometimes befall operations like that.

But if you look at what was happening today, which was just hundreds of people trying to climb over walls, rush gates, do whatever they could just to get inside the airport compound -- and these are people who probably don't even have a ticket on a civilian airline, let alone the promise of a U.S. military seat out of here -- it was utterly startling.

And the Taliban was sort of the crowd control between the front gates, where they were, and the large numbers of people moving up the airport road, as it's called, towards that gate and pushing them back, firing shots in the air, using U.S.-supplied Humvees and ranger trucks that have been given to the Afghan security forces they have ousted from here.

So extraordinary scenes, and ones that simply say the notion I think of some sort of tens of thousands-strong ability to take people from the center of the city and probably the most vulnerable people, after all, who have the right for the SIV program because they assisted the U.S. presence here, and then bring them through those Taliban into this airport, where there are hundreds of people streaming around, I have to tell you, even tonight, I can -- still been hearing the crackle of gunfire in what sounds like the direction of the airport pretty consistently.

I'm not entirely clear what's going on. The idea of that operation is to me quite startling, but, I mean, I'm not ruling out it is a slim possibility, but I'd have to say it would be more miraculous were they able to achieve something like that in these current conditions.

[15:05:04]

CAMEROTA: Nick, I mean, from here from the U.S., from where I sit, it has just been shocking to so many people, I mean, everyone from U.S. affairs analysts to just regular people, that after 20 years of blood and treasure, of all of the lives lost, of all of the service men and women wounded, of all of the money, the U.S. dollars spent, that this is how it ends after 20 years.

Is this turn of events as shocking on the ground in Kabul?

WALSH: Yes, I mean, this is what's happened because America wasn't paying attention.

And it's fair to say that I think some of the Biden administration officials were conscious of the fact that the Afghan war in its 20th year was not in the forefront of a pandemic America. This is something most people, if you asked them, thought should come to an end at some point.

What does that end look like? Well, it's this. And what we're seeing is an indictment of the huge disparity between what Joe Biden even as a few days ago was talking about Afghan security forces, over a trillion dollars spent, the talking points of the two decades nearly of American application here, the ways they convinced themselves that they could essentially leave and the Taliban wouldn't come back to power, and those coming tumbling down in a matter of about 10 days, in ways I never imagined.

You have to understand, Alisyn, covering this war, we have seen fights for weeks over villages, massive campaigns launched over sort of towns. Yet what we have seen the Taliban do is quite extraordinary, move through the major cities in about a week and then, most staggeringly here, walk into the capital almost unimpeded.

We don't know the full picture. But there haven't been massive clashes in the streets. And, instead, we see an insurgency who have often been invisible, frankly, when they have been attacking the Americans now in full daylight, walking around with their flags in the center of the city here.

Things may change moving forward. But it's an utterly staggering indictments of -- this is a difficult word to say -- but how deceitful much of America's statements about how well their campaign here had been going actually were. It fell apart so fast.

The Afghan army simply wasn't there. The things that have been promised Afghan officials here didn't stick around. And the Afghan government itself didn't stick around. President Ashraf Ghani, in the White House only recently, now we don't really know where he is. And he left without telling anybody.

We have had a statement on Facebook from him. So the key planks of America's policy here have really evaporated. And what's come in its place is a Taliban who I probably imagine are slightly surprised about how easy certainly getting into Kabul has been -- Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Nick Paton Walsh, it's so helpful to have you on the ground giving us all this information. And we will see what President Biden says this hour about it.

And, obviously, I'm sure he would object to the word deceitful. But is it clueless? Was it a lack of intelligence? We will see what he has to say about how this has surprised so many people. Thank you very much for your reporting.

So President Biden just returned to the White House from Camp David to address the nation and the world really on the situation in Afghanistan. We will bring you that speech live as soon as it happens.

CNN's Jeremy Diamond joins us now from the White House.

So, Jeremy, do we have any sense of what President Biden's going to say?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, listen, Alisyn, this is going to be the first time that we hear from President Biden since that stunning fall of Kabul and amid these images of these harried evacuations from that city at that airport, the images you were showing earlier, people clinging to U.S. Air Force planes. Look, what we can expect to hear from President Biden today is that he

will outline once again the rationale for ending this nearly-two- decades-long conflict, withdrawing American troops from there before, of course, this fall of Kabul that we saw here.

So you can expect him to go into his decision-making here, expressing, as officials have told us in recent days, that the president is not experiencing any second thoughts, any regrets about his decision here.

But the real question is whether or not President Biden will address the failure here, the failure to anticipate the speed of this Taliban advance, the failure to anticipate how quickly these Afghan government forces who have been backed with billions of dollars in funding and training and equipment over these last 20 years by the United States, how quickly they crumbled.

And that certainly is a miscalculation that we have heard the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the secretary of state, Tony Blinken, they have acknowledged that. What they haven't acknowledged is whether this was a failure of intelligence, whether this was a failure on President Biden's part to heed that intelligence.

And so those are some of the answers that we will certainly be looking for from the president. And we will see whether or not he decides to go into that.

Something else that I think we should explore to hear from the president is looking forward at what it means when the U.S. doesn't have a presence anymore in Afghanistan, diplomatic, intelligence military.

[15:10:09]

And we have heard a lot from President Biden over the last several weeks prior to this stunning fall of Kabul that, look, the U.S. is going to maintain a counterterrorism presence, maintain the ability to go in and take out potential terrorist threats to the United States.

But the question is, if the U.S. wasn't able to see how quickly the Taliban were able to rush through all these provincial capitals and into Kabul, how would the U.S. be able to see, to have the eyes and the intelligence to see any potential threats to the United States without any U.S. presence in that country -- Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Jeremy Diamond, thank you.

So, the big question right now is, how did all of this go so wrong so fast?

CNN national security correspondent Kylie Atwood is at the State Department.

So, Kylie, what's the explanation from officials there?

KYLIE ATWOOD, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, listen, I think folks here are really looking at the here and now in this moment, securing the airport, getting American diplomats home, getting these Afghan translators who helped American diplomats, who helped American troops home.

So that is really the focus in this building. And I can tell you, there's a lot of energy, there's a lot of frustration over the fact that they are scrambling over this.

But the other thing to note, I think, that it's important is that you have heard from a lot of officials that they are watching extremely closely for what the Taliban is going to do now that they have assumed control of Afghanistan.

We heard from the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas- Greenfield, today saying that human rights need to be respected, saying that the civilian population needs to be safe, clearly, clearly speaking to the Taliban there.

And we have also heard from White House officials saying that, if anyone interferes with Afghans who are trying to get to the airport safely to get out, there will be severe consequences. They are laying down some very clear language there.

The question is, what are they going to do about it? And how are they going to know exactly what's happening on the ground? Because, as Jeremy pointed out, our diplomats have left. Our U.S. military officials have left. Our intelligence presence is no longer there.

And as we talk about the Biden administration and their -- how they carried this out, how they really failed in their process to do this, there are also going to be questions for this building, for the diplomats about how diplomacy so failed, so failed here.

You look at the fact that the U.S. officials had been sitting down with the Taliban. They were pressing the Taliban on two things, to stop their military offenses, and to enter into a negotiated settlement for a political future of Afghanistan.

The Taliban had those conversations with these officials. And then they did exactly the opposite on the ground in Afghanistan. They continued with their military offenses. And as we can see, they came into control with no negotiated political settlement in sight.

CAMEROTA: Kylie Atwood, thank you very much for all that explanation.

So, the Taliban's rapid takeover of Afghanistan may have taken the Biden administration by surprise, but, for months, even years, many people warned that Afghan allies who risked their lives to help Americans over the past two decades would be in mortal danger when U.S. forces packed up and returned home.

Among those voices is Kirk Johnson, founder of The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies. And he joins us now.

Kirk, why wasn't the Biden administration and the U.S. and other administrations more prepared to get these people, our friends out? KIRK JOHNSON, FOUNDER, THE LIST PROJECT TO RESETTLE IRAQI ALLIES:

Well I have struggled for years to come up with a nicer answer to that question. But I think the honest truth is that we used these people when we needed them and, once we left, they're on their own.

We have -- these people have risked their lives. They have lost limbs. They have lost family members. They have had their kids abducted. They are directly in the crosshairs. And yet the minute that they have asked us for our help, what they're given is a piece of paper, and they're told to wait for years, and maybe we will give them a visa at some point.

For decades now, the United States has been making promises to these people, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan, that you come forward and you help us. You risk your lives to help these 18-year-old Marines from Ohio who don't speak Dari or Pashto, and we got your back.

And guess what? We don't. And I think the president, I think President Biden has just -- you know what? On the way over here, I had all these thoughts about what I wanted to say.

And I'm almost speechless at this moment, because I think the president has just made this calculation that the American public doesn't care about this war, doesn't care about the Afghans who are being killed in our name, and that once CNN pulls its news crews out, and we all stop paying attention to this, and the real bloodletting starts happening, that he won't suffer any political consequences.

[15:15:15]

But this is one of these issues that it -- it should not be left to the public opinion polls. This is just a fundamental question of, do we help those who helped us? Do we deliver on the promises we made to them?

So, you said at the top of the hour that the Pentagon has made a new promise now that they're going to let out 1,000 -- they're going to airlift to 1,000 out a day. They have been making these promises for years. A month ago, Biden made a promise that we were going to bring tens of thousands out.

So here's my advice for the president, if he's doing any last-second adjustments to his address. Stop making promises that you're not going to keep. How are we going to get thousands out now, when we don't have any bases anymore, when the airport is under siege, when you can't even land an airplane there?

I mean, this is so appalling. And it was so preventable. And I say this as somebody who voted for the president and as somebody who was for withdrawing from Afghanistan. But we didn't have to do it this way.

So we need to get beyond these idiotic binary choices that our only options were to stay for another decade or this, where we're -- we have got Afghans desperately clinging to our to our C-17s trying to get out, as if that was the only choice that Biden had. It's appalling.

And his advisers knew this was going to happen. The intelligence community knew this was going to happen. We have all known that this was going to happen, that the first people the Taliban would go after were the Afghans who risked their lives to help us.

And what did we do with all of that intelligence, with all of that certainty, with all the visa programs that bipartisan members of Congress have delivered over two decades to give visas to these people? What did we do? We just waved and we boarded our planes and we left.

Biden said this wasn't -- a month ago said this wasn't going to be Saigon rooftop, there wasn't a fair comparison. You know what? It's worse. This is far worse. Because the difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan was, Vietnam was not a landlocked country. The people we abandoned there got on boats and they fled.

The Afghans who are now and in the assassins' crosshairs have nowhere to go. And so they're all desperately looking for somebody to help him -- help them. And what are they getting? Nothing. They're getting more empty promises from this White House.

CAMEROTA: Kirk Johnson, for someone feeling speechless, you make a compelling case.

And we will see if President Biden addresses all of that this hour when he comes out to speak. Thanks so much for being here.

JOHNSON: Thanks for having me.

CAMEROTA: Minutes from now, President Biden will deliver his most significant speech as commander in chief on the stunning collapse of Afghanistan, a moment in history that could define his legacy on this.

So what will he say next?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:22:44]

CAMEROTA: This hour, we expect President Biden to address the nation on the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

It's the president's first big test as commander in chief. And he will have to explain why things have gone so horribly wrong so fast there and the plan to get American civilians still in Kabul to safety, as well as our Afghan allies.

Joining me now, CNN political director David Chalian and senior political commentator David Axelrod. David was also a senior adviser to President Obama.

Great to see both of you.

David Chalian, what will President Biden say today? What can he say today? What does the nation and the world want to hear from him?

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Well, I think he's certainly going to have to address two key things.

One, he's going to have to address the immediate. These pictures that we are seeing on the screens, how did it get to this? Both his national security adviser and as secretary of state have said that this all happened, the fall of the country, far more quickly than anybody anticipated.

Well, if that's true, why is that? Was there a failure in the intelligence that this -- these images that you're seeing were not presented to the president as a potential option that may occur here? So I think that that's first and foremost that he's going to have to deal with.

And, secondly, I do think he's going to have to sort of look upon the sweeping history of this moment, that this has been a 20-year-long conflict where blood and treasure have been committed to this by the American people. The families of service members who sacrificed their lives, the injured, anybody who served in this, and their families deserve to hear from their commander in chief why the last 20 years were not for naught, if they weren't, because, looking at how it's concluding, you can understand how some may come to that conclusion.

And so I think this is a big, first real commander in chief moment for Joe Biden here to step up to the plate and try to address the American people on that front. And at least on those two things, I think it's critical we hear from him.

CAMEROTA: Axe, you were in the room during the Obama administration, I know, when some of these conversations were happening with President Obama, with Vice President -- then-Vice President Biden.

[15:25:02]

And Vice President Biden, it seems like, was never a fan of this, or not for a long time. I mean, he's, I think wanted to get out earlier than right now. And so what were those conversations?

DAVID AXELROD, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, Alisyn, yes, I remember them very vividly back in 2009.

The Afghanistan policy had drifted for seven years because the United States had turned its attention to Iraq. And President Obama was interested in refocusing that strategy and seeing through to an endgame here. And he put together a series of meetings in the Situation Room.

The military had a plan that they propose to surge 40,000 troops to Afghanistan in a counterinsurgency program that was meant to prop up civil society, prop up the government, train military personnel and police.

Biden was very skeptical then. And he was very vocal in these meetings about it. He felt we went to Afghanistan to rout al Qaeda and to bring to justice the people who attacked us on 9/11 and that we shouldn't engage in what he felt was mission creep and get mired in something that we could never get out of.

And he wanted instead to have a smaller counterterrorism force. He mostly lost that argument. President Obama did send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, in exchange for a timetable for ratcheting down that engagement.

But here we are 12 years later, and now it's Biden as commander in chief who has to deal with the aftermath of all of that. And let me say, I think he has to do two things in this speech. The first -- and he has to separate out the issues -- was it the right decision to wind down our engagement in Afghanistan?

And, in that sense, he -- I think he will say he had very little choice by the time he became president. There were 2, 500 troops in Afghanistan, an agreement had been struck to withdraw by May 1 by the Trump administration, and to stay there against what was going to be an assault from the Taliban would have required sending thousands and thousands of troops back and to reengage in Afghanistan.

That's not what the American people want. And it would raise the question about when does this ever end 20 years into it? I think he has a very colorable case there.

But you cannot defend the execution here. This has been a disaster. And everybody, anybody with a beating heart watching these scenes of people desperately swarming the airport trying to get out ahead of the slaughter that they anticipate from the Taliban, it is heartbreaking, it is depressing, and it's a failure. And he needs to own that failure.

He's the commander in chief. It's fine to say, the Afghans didn't fight. That is true. We invested $90 billion or so in the army and the police there. They folded immediately. That is true. You can blame the Trump administration.

But he's the commander in chief now. And he can blame intelligence too. And, obviously, it was a huge intelligence failure. But in these moments, I think people respect presidents who say, this is on me. This was on my watch. This was a failure. We're going to learn from it. And we're going to do everything we can in the coming weeks and -- days and weeks and months to make good our promise to our partners in Afghanistan who helped us during these 20 years to escape the wrath of the Taliban.

I think that's what he needs to do. I don't know what he will do. But that's what I would advise him if I were there.

CAMEROTA: And if he does that, David Chalian, does that spare him whatever political price might be paid from this? I mean, this is an unpopular war, let's face it, 20 years in now.

And so it's impossible to know, probably, if there will be a political price. But what do you think the consequences for President Biden are?

CHALIAN: Right.

Well, as David was just saying, I mean, the long-term political consequences of this, the American people don't want to stay engaged forever in Afghanistan. So the ultimate policy of withdrawing from there, Joe Biden's on the side of the American people with that.

But, in this moment, with the failure in the execution that David's talking about, that has provided a political opening, perhaps, for Republicans. It gets wider if Joe Biden doesn't accept responsibility. If the advice that David was just giving is not heeded, I think then Joe Biden risks a credibility gap with the American people because of everything he had said leading up to this, that these images, these very images you're seeing would not be possible, would not happen in this scenario.

And, clearly, that wrong.