service members, the situation going on there. so i m both heartbroken and angry at the same time. by the way, you are hearing more and more about isis k. it is not a new dynamic in afghanistan. they ve been building up there for over three years waiting for a moment like this. waiting for a president like joe biden to create a chaotic situation like what he has to strike and we saw what s happened over the last couple of hours. we ll see a lot more of that to come in the days ahead. harris: congressman, the way you put that, i m looking at my notes. for 20 years we have basically been fighting the militant partners, the taliban, al qaeda, haqqani network. isis k is not new but it was created quickly outside the gates of the airport. when we say we had control of that militarily. is that your understanding that we didn t control as much as we
into afghanistan and we don t know if it s cash or equipment. we don t know what that would be. what we know their internet is up and running in taliban country. and so all of that is on servers that we don t control. i couldn t speak to the security of the encryption and the state department has not said anything to that event. something that is important having spent some time in war zones such as this is we don t have the human intelligence outside of that airport to go and get americans nor to give us the intelligence in realtime. we re in a fluid inflection point right now with the president committed to that withdrawal and clearly dependent upon a taliban government entirely in control of kabul. they re holding all the cards. at this point we ve received no information that the taliban is either acknowledging nor doing anything to help us in this situation, which has left
footprint of special operations counter terrorism focused troops in afghanistan through all of this and if we would have kept the bagram airfield open rather than rely on the very inefficient kabul public airport. this situation could have unfolded more effectively and in a much much better way than it has. we ll get back to the asking those questions later. in the meantime we have to get all these americans out of country and i don t have the confidence this administration is able to do that. harris: so congressman quickly because you can talk tactics with us now and with some specificity. every american is wondering if we were there, what would we be doing? we are getting mixed messages on the ground. we re being told to get to the airport and now the airport is too dangerous to get to. you have people in other parts of the country can t get there. if we pull up stakes do we have to go back in with a bigger
east no matter where they are coming there are only a couple of places they can mass safely inside the perimeter of the airport. if you can t get there you might go to the barron hotel where people have been waiting. everybody knows that, including the enemy. in this case we don t know which enemy. there are so many of them on the ground there. what you are talking about in terms of just giving it to us straight, did you negotiate with terrorists, and are you still negotiating with them because it looks like maybe they ve got some company on the ground. are we going to negotiate with that terrorist group too? real quick and i ll scoot. just ultimately the u.s. policy with afghanistan has been changing a lot. a couple days ago the press secretary said that she did not think that this airlift was anything but a success. it seems like that has changed now as well.
we re talking about american citizens, american green card holders, afghan nationals who have helped us, fought alongside our soldiers. they lost over 60,000 soldiers in the 20-year conflict. we ve lossed 2500 soldiers in the conflict. as you point out we have american military members right there on the ground right now heroes going to try to save these lives of americans and afghan allies all in harm s way. they are congregating at the gates where they are being let into the airport. thousands of people at various gates around the airport. i don t want to describe which gates people are at. but i will say this. there are taliban checkpoints all around the airport that you have to proceed through just to get to the gates that they are being advised to go to. at times they re being told draw back from the gates, step back. they are told if you want to get out of the country before withdrawal happens you have to go to the gates. there is a tension.