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Chaos Still Reigns at Kabul Airport; GOP Strategizing to Turn Afghanistan into 'New Benghazi'. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired August 20, 2021 - 06:00   ET

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

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning to our viewers here in the United States and around the world. It is Friday, August 20. I'm Brianna Keilar along with John Avlon here in studio.

[05:59:40]

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST/ANCHOR: Good morning.

KEILAR: Good morning to you.

And the clock is ticking. The desperation is building for thousands and thousands of Americans and Afghan allies, who are trying to escape from Afghanistan. Here is what we know right now.

We know that 3,000 people were evacuated in the last 24 hours on 16 military transport flights. That is a number that includes 350 Americans and U.S. permanent citizens.

Now, for people on the ground, trying to get out is simply terrifying. This is harrowing. You see a video here of a young child being handed to American troops on top of a wall at the airport perimeter there in Kabul.

AVLON: President Biden will be briefed on Afghanistan later this morning and will address the nation at 1 p.m. Eastern. All U.S. senators will also be briefed virtually this afternoon.

We also have new details about a classified cable sent to the State Department by U.S. diplomats in mid-July, calling for swift action to prevent a catastrophe in Afghanistan.

And in an extraordinary move, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Admiral Peter Vasely, has been leading the effort to negotiate with his Taliban counterpart to maintain security at the Kabul airport, while the State Department engages in high-level diplomatic talks with the Taliban in the neutral setting in Kabul.

Right now, joining us from Kabul Airport is CNN's Clarissa Ward. Clarissa, what are you seeing there?

CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (via phone): Well, we've been here about eight hours. I have to say, John, the most intense part was getting into the airport itself. These were scenes that I'll never forget. Pushing, pushing, people just -- and we went to a gate that had far fewer people than most of them. But still, it was just heartbreaking. People pushing, scrambling,

crying, screaming, children crying out. It really was an awful, awful scene.

And then from there, you go in to be processed. And honestly, for most Afghans, it can take -- it can take more than a day. We waited around for five hours, you know, in the hot, hot sun. There were families. There were babies. At one stage, a newborn baby was brought through quickly on a military vehicle. It zipped past us, and we went and chased after. And the soldier told us that the baby had dehydrated and was suffering from some kind of a sunstroke. The baby is now apparently OK, because it was able to get medical attention.

But, you know, just an awful scene. And you think to yourself, these are the lucky ones. These are the people who are able to get in through that first phase.

But boy, even once you get in through that first gate, there are so many check points. There are hours and hours, if not days of waiting. And then I have to say, as well, we saw a lot of people getting turned away, because once you get to the check point where your papers have to be presented, if you don't have the proper paperwork, you're not getting on the plane.

So we did see quite a few people being turned away. I talked to a woman, as well, who had been separated from her family. They were outside the main gate. People telling us awful stories of being separated from their families, being crushed.

I spoke to one soldier who said that a woman has been trampled almost to death yesterday night. Another one told me exactly what you just mentioned about the baby. Babies being thrown over the razor wire because -- to avoid them getting crushed and to try to get them out safely.

One U.S. soldier told me his buddy actually caught the baby and had to go and find the family to give the baby back. I spoke to another British soldier who broke down while I was talking to him, just broke down. He said, had two deployments in Helmand province. I'll have more PTSD from the last week than from either of those two deployments.

I mean, the scenes here are intense. And it's -- it's not anything that most of these soldiers are used to or experienced with or prepared for. And that's what's making it just very, very hard on them as well -- John, Brianna.

KEILAR: I wonder, Clarissa, if you can speak to -- look, it's very clear that there seem to be a series of bottlenecks here for getting people into the airport, because what we're hearing from the Pentagon is that they actually have the airlift capacity to get 5 to 9,000 people out per day, and they're not getting anywhere near that.

WARD: No.

KEILAR: So can you give us a sense of where the biggest problem is? I mean, is it that just that first point of getting past the Taliban into the airport?

WARD: To be honest, I mean, that's clearly the most intense bottleneck, right? And then that's where you have the absolute crush of people being trampled, pushed up against metal doors, throwing babies and all of those horrific scenes that have been going on.

But then you still have a series of bottlenecks once you get inside, trying to organize even the vehicles to move these people that are coming in from multiple gates. They need to be processed.

You know, there's about five or six nodes along the process. And at each of those nodes, you get a major bottleneck.

[06:05:11]

So I can say, if we hadn't been spotted by a public affairs officer who very graciously took us to the -- you know, to the airfield, we definitely would have been waiting for, you know, probably around eight or nine hours in the 100-degree sun, which is fine for us.

But, you know, we were surrounded by families with babies. There's also a lot of delay, and I don't understand why, because earlier in the day, we saw, I think, at least three U.S. military aircraft taking off, presumably all full with evacuees.

But now there has been a real lull for a couple of hours now, and we've been told that there is some delay going on. It's not clear what is causing these delays. We see that there are a lot of aircraft on the airfield.

But of course, we're not privy to -- to their operations. So, I'm not sure exactly what would be causing those delays, but there is definitely still moving quite slowly here.

One soldier told me that they managed to get out 13,000 people in one week, which he said was the largest air lift evacuation in U.S. history. I'm not able to independently confirm that fact. That's what he told me.

But, so I would just say, you know, everyone is trying their best, but I also spoke to plenty of soldiers along the way who acknowledge privately that it's chaos. It's chaos. And, you know, half the time the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and we've got all these different individual parties involved, whether it's the Taliban, whether it's Afghan commandos, whether it's British paratroopers, whether it's U.S. Marines, the State Department. There are a lot of cooks in this kitchen. And -- and that may explain some of the holdups, as well, and some of the bottlenecks.

KEILAR: And look, we're understanding the official count that we are hearing from the Pentagon is that, I think, they've gotten about 9,000 out. That is what we've been hearing.

So, we don't think at this point it is at that 13,000 number. But the truth is, it's really difficult to know, because there is a disconnect from information on the ground, which is why it's so essential that you're giving us a sense of what it's like at the airport there.

Clarissa, thank you so much.

WARD: Thank you.

AVLON: And we'll be coming back to Clarissa. But first let's go to Doha, Qatar, where many Afghans are arriving. CNN's Nick Paton Walsh is there.

Nick, what are you seeing in Qatar?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, this is obviously where Clarissa eventually and all those Afghans will end up arriving. And the scenes, as I saw on Tuesday, is of a growing number of Afghans at the base here. They have to be processed. They arrive in different conditions of documents, no documents, for permission, et cetera. It seems like, listening to Clarissa, that more people are being turned away, that the system is beginning to filter out those individuals who are supposed to be part of the special immigrant visa program.

I should tell you, speaking to various sources of mine, there appear to be other individuals who are getting on simply through connections that they have. And so that process is, it seems still, a little chaotic.

The numbers, too, are going to have to be very carefully and transparently explained by the White House. They've talked about 14,000 since July. That's kind of since it's got underway. They also said that the State Department had 6,000 people on that base processed and ready to fly.

Now, 3,000 flew out, according to the White House. And then maybe 3,000 still stuck there.

But this is exceptionally important, because it's about whether these are the right people. It's about reducing the numbers on the outside. And then, two, there is the inevitable fact that, if good news comes out about this process, it will encourage more people to come.

So the scenes outside will possibly continue at this level of panic. And you know, U.S. is clearly trying to negotiate with the Taliban to some degree, it seems. It's opaque so far, but it seems that is causing the Taliban to stay back from this process and not stop people around the gates, although they're now, it seems, blocking roads towards the airports.

And so you have to ask yourself, how long could this go on for, because there is probably an infinite number, sounds silly to say, but a significantly large number of Afghans who would like to use this mechanism.

The Pentagon were clear yesterday, they simply do not know how many American citizens there are still left in Afghanistan to evacuate. And if that is the key metric, which President Joe Biden seems to suggest that was his sort of stopping point, he definitely wants the allied Afghans to come off to. But certainly, American citizens a priority.

Then this is an indefinitely endurable process. So I have to say, it does sound a little bit like more people are getting on than I saw on Tuesday when the gates were totally shut, because it's problematic.

[06:10:04]

But then you have another issue, too. If there are too many on the base, they may have to close the gates to slow the incoming down, too.

People are dying out there in that heat, in that crush. That has been happening. There are U.S. Marines doing the very best they can in crowd control, with the language barrier and extreme desperation circumstances they've never seen before.

But I should say we're getting a slight feeling that the threat against those who worked for that U.S. presence may be there somewhere. Deutsche Wella have announced that a family member of one of their journalists was killed by the Taliban. We don't have comment on the Taliban yet.

And this is the first, I would think to say, very concrete report we have of that. But it will cause alarm and certainly escalation of desperation in that crowd -- John.

AVLON: Well, Qatar the scene of a lot of those refugees arriving from Kabul, as well as critical negotiations. Nick Paton Walsh, thank you very much.

KEILAR: So all U.S. senators will receive an unclassified virtual briefing on Afghanistan this afternoon from top cabinet officials. And CNN has learned that some Republicans are already angling to capitalize politically on the crisis, viewing Afghanistan, really, as their new Benghazi.

Lauren Fox is with us now to talk about this.

Look, they do see political opportunity in this. This has been bungled by the Biden administration. We're still very much in the throes of it, as well, though.

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Exactly. And I think that the House and the Senate's approach from Republicans is very different here.

One thing that we're hearing from House Republicans is this may be an opportunity politically to talk about what has already been a pretty popular president thus far passing infrastructure, passing other major COVID relief programs.

So their view is that, if you talk about this like the crisis that it is, like the crisis that we are seeing playing out on the ground, that that may be a way to sort of motivate voters. And if they win back the House in 2022, they would use their committee power, their subpoena power to really drag this out into the next presidential election. Right? So here is what Representative Mike Johnson, who is a Republican on

the Armed Services Committee, said. Quote, "This makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue. This may be one of the worst and most consequential foreign policy and national security disasters in our history. There will be a lot of answers to seek and questions to be answered, and I think it will be a top priority."

Now, I do want to contrast this a little bit, because I talked to Joni Ernst, a Republican who is a former combat veteran. and she told me, look, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered here, but we are trying to work with our Democratic colleagues to deal with the issue at hand, which is getting people who are stuck in Afghanistan back to the United States, that that is the most important thing right now.

So a little bit of a double screen right now between the House and the Senate. We should also note, of course, that the senators are going to receive this briefing today. And you can expect that they are going to be asking what are you doing to get Americans out? How many Americans are left in the country?

KEILAR: And look, House Republicans, they're going to have to be careful, quite frankly, because of how they've approached, also, some of these visa issues. All of the votes were House Republican votes. That's probably what you were going to say.

AVLON: All 16 votes the people who voted against them were sort of hard core Trumpers in the House. And look, it's absolute legitimate to do an after-action report. What went wrong? Operationally, this has been boggled. But to all of a sudden say it's the new Benghazi and politicize it in this way, while the crisis is still going on is crazy.

KEILAR: Lauren, thank you so much for your reporting. Really appreciate it.

And joining us now to discuss all of this is Craig Whitlock, an investigative journalist with "The Washington Post" who broke the Afghanistan paper story in 2019. He details that and more in his forthcoming book, which is called "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of War."

OK, Craig, first things, let's talk about this mem that we have learned about, this internal memo from American diplomats in Afghanistan warning the State Department of a potential crisis back in July.

CRAIG WHITLOCK, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": That's right. It's what's known as a dissent cable. This is a diplomatic cable sent to Washington to the State Department for the eyes of the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, in which about two dozen diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Kabul were warning that, you know, the Afghan government could fall a lot sooner than anticipated.

The Afghan security forces were in a really weak position with the Taliban and essentially warning that the U.S. government needed to do a much better job at stepping up evacuation contingency plans.

So to have two dozen diplomats in that embassy sign this dissent cable is yet another sign that people within the U.S. government just didn't think they saw storm clouds coming, and they didn't think they were going to be equipped to handle them.

AVLON: Well, and Craig, this goes really to the heart of President Biden's statement that it was extremely unlikely that there would be chaos before this all unfolded this way. The administration basically saying this was an intelligence failure. They didn't anticipate the speed.

[06:15:06]

But this cable would seem to suggest that there were diplomats on the ground warning and Secretary of State Blinken saying that he reads all dissent cables. So this should have gone to the top. Doesn't that point out to a core contradiction in the administration's case today?

WHITLOCK: It does. It did go to the top, and it sounds like Blinken did review it. I don't think anyone, even the diplomats who signed this cable, knew that the Afghan army and police would essentially evaporate within the space of a week or ten days.

I think that honestly did catch many people by surprise in the U.S. government. And right now, there's a lot of people, you know, agencies trying to point the finger at other parts of the U.S. government, because there's a lot of blame going around.

But still, Biden himself went on camera just last month to sort of dismiss the idea that things could get really chaotic at the end, that you know, he dismissed the idea that this might be a Saigon moment, like in Vietnam in 1979 when U.S. helicopters had to evacuate people off the roof of the embassy.

But yet, what we're seeing here, in many ways, looks a lot worse than what happened in Saigon. You have, you know, the airport being controlled by the U.S. military but trying to get people to the airport, as Clarissa described earlier, is just, you know, it's this really, really tense situation.

And frankly, things could get worse. At least the Taliban and the U.S. military aren't shooting at each other at this point. It wouldn't take much for things to get worse.

KEILAR: OK. So let's talk a little bit about that. Let's talk about the challenges of folks getting to the airport.

What's interesting is that we actually have seen many reports of British and French forces doing extraction operations in Kabul. Now, this isn't wide-scale. We're talking about maybe dozens and dozens of people.

The U.S. does not have that appetite to go beyond the perimeter of the airport. How do you see this developing, Craig? WHITLOCK: Well, the big question, as has been raised earlier, is we

just don't know how many people the Americans are trying to get out or, frankly, are willing to get out. And there's a priority for American citizens. And I think that's a little easier for some of those folks if they have the documentation to prove it.

But then you just have an untold thousands numbers of Afghans who helped the Americans over the years, who had been promised being brought to safety?

And how long will this operation last? How many of those people can we bring out? What -- how long will the Taliban persist? I mean, right now, there are all these choke points, and the Taliban is making it very tough for people to get to the airport.

But that could go either way. They could relent at some point, make it easier, or they could make it a lot tougher at the drop of a hat. And we just -- we don't know how long this is going to take and how long the president, frankly, is going to keep up with it. It could go on for days, weeks, months. You know, I just don't know.

KEILAR: But we don't know. Look, Craig, there's a lot of time before August 31, and there are many days, many, many days that it will be required to get these people out, if they can get them out.

Craig, thank you so much.

WHITLOCK: Thank you.

KEILAR: Craig Whitlock, really appreciate it.

And still ahead, doctors are warning of dire emergencies in their hospitals as the numbers of COVID cases continue to rise. Some nurses are now making an emotional plea for people to get vaccinated before it's too late.

Plus, CNN is there as rescue crews race to save the youngest patients from the earthquake disaster in Haiti.

AVLON: And new details about the man who phoned in a bomb threat outside the U.S. Capitol. That's next.

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[06:22:50]

KEILAR: Breaking overnight, the Supreme Court of Texas rejecting Governor Greg Abbott's request to intervene on the mask mandate issue in several jurisdictions.

Abbott can still appeal this, but he must do so to the court of appeals before he can go to the state Supreme Court.

Across the country, hospitals are being pushed to the brink. Now more than 90,000 people are hospitalized, which is triple the number that we saw just in the past month. Hospitals in Austin, Texas, are at a breaking point as coronavirus

patients are filling intensive care unit beds there. One official is calling this a very dire situation.

In Tennessee, a member of the governor's COVID-19 task force and an infectious disease specialist at the University of Tennessee says the state could see cases rise exponentially.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. SARA CROSS, MEMBER, TENNESSEE GOVERNOR'S COVID TASK FORCE: We are estimating that the number of cases in Tennessee will increase six- fold by the end of September, if we don't take measures to mitigate the spread.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: And a record number of coronavirus patients are overloading hospitals in Florida. More than 17,000 patients are hospitalized across the Sunshine State.

The Florida Hospital Association says 90 percent of them, 90 percent are unvaccinated. In an effort to underscore the importance of getting vaccinated, the association released a PSA with a truly heart-breaking message. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We had someone in her 30s, a young mommy. She left her husband and three little kids, ages 4, 2, 8. They're saying, "Mommy, come home. Mommy, I miss you." She's not saying anything, because she's intubated. It's rough. It's rough to watch every day. It's very rough.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: I have an 8-year-old at home and that is a heart-breaking but powerful PSA.

Joining me now is the president and CEO of the Florida Hospital Association, Mary Mayhew.

Mary, thanks for joining us. What are your nurses and doctors saying is the difference between the surge now versus a year ago at the height of the pandemic in Florida?

[06:25:08]

MARY MAYHEW, PRESIDENT AND CEO, FLORIDA HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION: Well, first of all, over a short period of time, we've just seen a rapid increase in the number of hospitalizations. Now, over 17,000 individuals hospitalized for COVID. That occurred over just a handful of weeks, a little more than six weeks.

And it is fundamentally different from what we've experienced in the previous surges. And that is, we are seeing a much younger group of individuals who are hospitalized for COVID, in our intensive care units on ventilators.

These are healthy, young 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds who, because of the aggressive nature of the Delta variant, are now being hospitalized. That simply did not happen in the previous surges.

AVLON: That's so critical to highlight. You know, some folks still think if they're young, they're invincible. They're going to miss 20- and 30-year-olds hospitalized.

I want to get into the numbers here. I want to show the numbers, because they are grim. Hospitals in the state have a 14 percent bed availability right now. Eight percent in the ICU. Thirty-six of all patients in Florida hospitals have COVID, and 75 percent of your hospitals are facing a critical staffing shortage in the next week.

So, how are your hospitals going to cope if hospitalizations continue to surge as expected in Florida?

MAYHEW: Well, first, let me just underscore that hospitals have very sophisticated surge plans. And they are doing everything possible to respond to this demand by postponing, safely postponing those services that can be scheduled at a later date so that they can redeploy their staff into the hospitals at the bedside.

They are bringing staff in from other states. They are using contracted staffing. Some hospitals have had to convert auditoriums, cafeterias to meet patient demand.

But it is why we felt so strongly, along with the Florida Medical Association, about producing these public service announcements. We need people to get vaccinated.

What is so heart-breaking is that these hospitalizations for those unvaccinated are preventable. The loss of life for those who are in their 20s and 30s is preventable. We need them to get vaccinated.

AVLON: I mean, there really is no excuse. They are putting their lives, the lives of their loved ones at risk.

I want to show you a picture from a patient who is apparently waiting for monoclonal antibody therapy in Jacksonville. But folks are so sick they're lying on the floor while waiting to get treated. Is this the kind of chaos, frankly, you're seeing in your hospitals?

MAYHEW: I want to also just focus on the fact that not only are we seeing a significant number of COVID hospitalizations, but we have a much higher volume of critically ill, non-COVID patients. We have a severe staffing shortage.

And that's -- Florida is not unique. There is a work force shortage around the country. But it is the combination of those factors that is stretching the system, straining the system.

And of course, at the end of the day, we have frontline healthcare heroes who have been responding to this pandemic now for over 18 months. And so the physical and mental health exhaustion and now, of course,

the trauma of what they are seeing, especially with these younger individuals who are ending up acutely ill in the hospital.

AVLON: That is such an important point. And I do want to highlight that in this race between this virus and the vaccine, we have seen a surge of vaccinations recently in Florida, a 55 percent increase.

That is progress. But it's going to have to make a lot more progress to stop this chaos and pain in the hospitals.

Mary Mayhew, thank you very much.

MAYHEW: Thank you.

AVLON: All right. Three U.S. senators, three U.S. senators testing positive for coronavirus, despite being fully vaccinated. So are these breakthrough infections still considered rare? We've got Dr. Sanjay Gupta joining us, just ahead.

KEILAR: Plus a bomb scare at the Capitol. What we are learning about the suspect who surrendered after an hours'-long standoff with police. We'll have a live report next.

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