0 i thank you very much for the way that you have kept us engaged and informed as decisions have been made. as you pointed out, the biden administration was dealt a very difficult hand on the withdrawal from afghanistan. we all recognize we needed to withdrawal and the options were extremely limited. the mistakes made by previous administrations, we talked about it, but i think we need to understand that many of us did not support the 2002 campaign to go into iraq. one of those reasons was we wanted to complete the mission in afghanistan when we had a chance to do it when the taliban was diminished after our military came in after the attack on our country, but instead we went into iraq which was not engaged in the 9/11 activities, and we never fin finished afghanistan. a mistake by the bush administration. it doesn't negate the information that was made available to you about the strength of the afghan security forces and the ghani administration's will to stick with it in afghanistan. i think many of us are interested in knowing how intelligence got that so wrong. the contingency plans are ones that we really do want to review, because it seems to us there had to be better ways to secure passage into the airport than what ultimately happened. considering the hand you were dealt, considering the crisis that developed, evacuating 124,000 was a miraculous test, so we congratulate all that were involved in the evacuation of so many people under such a short period of time under such difficult circumstances. i want to get to where we are today. during this process the state department was very open to all members of congress, democrats, republicans, as we filtered information into you about vulnerable people in an effort to get them out of afghanistan. today our offices are still being die luged. can you share with us the process that you are using in order to filter information about americans that are still in afghanistan who wanted to leave, those that apply for siv status and those afghans that are at risk, how do we transmit that information and what process is in place so we can try and get these people out of afghanistan? >> thank you, senator. as i noted, we have established a task force focused entirely on relocation to help those that wish to leave afghanistan whether they are any remaining american citizens or siv applicants, or nationals of other countries that want to get out, and that involves case management teams, 500 individuals whose task is to be in constant contact with any remaining americans that wish to leave, and that's what they are doing. and the legislative affairs office is in constant contact with you as well as outside groups who have identified and are trying to help people that seek to leave. this here is the sum total of cases brought to us by members of this committee, just this committee, that all of you, or many of you have been working and we are deeply grateful for the efforts and this information. it insures when you send us this information, we put it into our database, if it's not already there, and we make sure we are able to track it and make sure we are able to coordinate with you, and i recognize that especially in the early going during the evacuation itself, some of the feedback was lacking. we were trying to do all of this in real time making sure we took in the information you were providing and acting on, and in some cases we did not get back to people to say this is what we have done, and we are working to get back to everybody, and we have 26,000 inqueries in congress -- >> we still have the categories of reporters that work for us still in afghanistan, and we have women, officials that were officials in afghanistan that are at risk, and we have ngos that worked with us in afghanistan, and they are employees that are at risk. you are saying we still have an opportunity to work with you to get that information to the sources that you are using to try and arrange for their exit from afghanistan? >> absolutely. we very much invite that and we want to make sure we have best as possible a unified coordinated list so that we know what everyone is working on and we can track and we can help or take on depending on the -- >> can i get your best guess on the numbers? at one point when we first started we thought there would be somewhere around a little under $100,000 that wanted to leave, and obviously that number was low, and we evacuated over 124,000. do we know how much u.s. citizens that want to exit today, how many are in siv status and how many afghans are at risk that we want to help? >> the number is about 100 of u.s. citizens that want to leave. it's hard to give a real time number at any given moment because it's very fluid, by which i mean this. some people -- we're in direct contact with this group. some for very understandable reasons want to change their mind from day-to-day about whether or not they want to leave. others continue even now to raise their hands and say i'm an american citizen in afghanistan, somebody who would not identify themselves before. as you all know very, very well, we do not require as a country our citizens to register or identify themselves to our embassies in any country in the world when they travel there or if they reside there. >> do you have the numbers for the siv? >> the siv numbers, that's what we are tabulating right now, because we want to account for everybody, and some are in other countries and some are in the united states and we are putting those numbers together to determine -- the overwhelming majority of afghans thanks to our evacuation efforts, they were afghans at risk, and some will be in other categories, and we are breaking down all of those numbers and should have a breakdown in the next couple of weeks. >> thank you, and look forward to seeing that. senator rubio? >> thank you. secretary, even the most pessimistic assessment, i back that out by saying you cite general milley that said there was no indication there would be a collapse of afghan army and government. i am now the vice chair of intelligence and i have been tracking this very closely. just going back to the beginning of this year, i can just obviously can't quote the titles of the pieces, but there are numerous pieces that would be categorized as it's going to hit the fan. let's put that aside. any analysis of those pieces would lead anybody to that conclusion, and we had every reason to believe and plan for the rapid collapse of the afghan military and government. by all admissions, we had a bad status quo in afghanistan, and we had a small footprint and a strong commitment to air support, and that sustained the afghan's security forces to resist the afghanistan, and they were suffering 10,000 casualties a year, and the taliban was suffering casualties, too, but they enjoyed a safe haven in pakistan. they were able to go there to rest, train, recruit. so summer, even before the withdrawal we had a terrible status quo. the security forces, a small number of u.s. forces continued to die. we had u.s. losses as well. i want to mention that. the afghan government was still corrupt and the taliban had an unchallenged safe haven in pakistan, and if after 20 years and hundreds of billions of support and equipment and training there was not enough for the afghan government or security forces to become more resilient or self sustaining, and what did we think was going to happen when that terrible status quo was changed? it didn't take piece of analysis, by removing air support, the status quo was going to collapse in favor of the taliban. this is not an argument in favor of staying, and we are not debating with withdrawal, but we had a terrible status quo, and the afghan government even after $20 billion, we should know as we begin the drawdown support we were going to see the potential for a collapse. that's what all the pieces pointed to as well. it's concerning nobody saw all of this and concluded there was no evidence or no reason to believe that there could be a rapid collapse. more to that point, we began to see clear signs weeks ago that this is where it was headed. without air strikes, the taliban began to maneuver going from intimidating the small afghan out posts to getting them into quitting. we were seeing afghan out posts beginning to quit. they went from surrounding the small -- this is not the same time on july 8th when president biden was giving the nigh kwraef predictions. you could see they were splintering the remains of any sort of resistance. weeks before the fall of kabul, you could see the taliban was on the verge and headed towards something they had not done before, isolate kabul from the north and cutting off all supply routes. we knew weeks before that we were headed for a taliban-control of the north, and all of the traditional routes of taliban encroachment on kabul were sealed from the south and east, and kabul faced the prospect of no fuel and the afghan government faced the prospect of no viable defense. what did we think was going to happen? all of those things were in place at the time. the most concerning part of it is if we did not have an analysis that looks at all this this was not a failure of intelligence but a failure of policy and planning. we have the long people planning and analyzing this. either somebody didn't see it or want to see it, and we established we could be out by september 11th, so we could have a ceremony showing that we pulled out of afghanistan on 9/11, and from a geopolitical perspective, this is not a good place. china, russia, iran, they look at the botched withdrawal, and it's incompetent they see and i think our allies, they are now number one, have to be wondering about our reliability, the credibility of our defense agreements with them, and they also have to be really, really upset at the prospect of a massive refugee crisis landing right on their borders here soon. india, and i know there was an announcement today there will be a meeting of the quad, and if you are india, you are looking at this and saying if the united states allowed pakistan to unravel their standing, because the pakistani role in all of this, and multiple administrations are guilty of ignoring it, and this is a victory for the taliban hardliners and they have to be looking at this and saying if the united states could have a third-rate power like pakistan unravel it's aims, what chance to do have of confronting china. i think this leaves us in a terrible situation. i don't know how it's possible. if, in fact, the people in charge of our foreign policy did not see the factors, and conclude there was a possibility of a rapid collapse, then we have the wrong people making military and diplomacy decisions in our government. >> senator, i am happy to respond briefly in the time that we have. as you know, from your own expertise and leadership on these matters, there are constant assessments being done and in this particular case assessments being done of the resilience of afghan security forces and of the afghan government and different scenarios established from worse case to best case and everything in between. ultimately the preponderance of the intelligence and assessments land someplace, and they are always going to be voices and it's critically important that we listen to all of them who may be talking about exclusively the worst case, some the best case, and some in between. here's what i can say in this setting. we can take this up as well in other settings. back in february, the assessment of the overall assessment of the community was that after a complete u.s. military withdrawal, that could potentially in the worst-case scenario lead to the taliban capturing kabul within a year or two. that's back in february, and that was more or less where things stood in the winter and into the spring. by july, and you are exactly right, that the situation was deteriorating as the taliban continued to make progress on the ground throughout the summer. in july, the ic indicated it was more likely than not that the taliban would take over by the end of the year, the end of this year. that said, we, the intelligence community, did not say the country-wide collapse of all meaningful resistance would be likely to occur in a number of days, and you referenced jenle milley earlier, nothing that i saw or that we saw suggested that this government or security force would collapse in a matter of 11 days. you are right, and i think we need to look back at all of this, because to your point we collectively over 20 years invested extraordinary amounts in security forces and in that government, hundreds of billions of dollars, equipment, training, advice, support, and based on that as well as based on what we were looking at realtime, again, we did not see this collapse in a matter of 11 days. but it is important that we go back and look at all this. >> time has expired. >> thank you. >> senator sidney. >> thank you, mr. chairman and secretary blinken for appearing before the committee today. i appreciate and share the frustration of my colleagues over the challenges of the evacuation, and over the situation of special immigrant visa applicants and the taliban's treatment of women and girls and other minorities, and i also agree with your assessment and that has been given by several others of that where we were when we got to the evacuation, was because of the failed republican and democratic administrations. starting with senator mccain, i and others in the senate tried to get more special immigrant visa applicants through the process so that they could leave afghanistan, leave the threat and come to the united states, and there were a few republicans in the senate who blocked us year after year from getting more siv applicants to the united states. i want to know where that outrage was during the negotiations by the trump administration and former secretary pompeo, when they were giving away the rights of women and girls. when secretary pompeo came before this committee and blew off questions about what they were doing to pressure the taliban to have women at the negotiating table for that peace treaty, so i think there's a lot of regret and a lot of recriminations to go around, and the important thing for us to do now is to figure out how we can work together to address those people that still need to be evacuated from afghanistan and also to ensure that we can do everything possible with the international community to help protect the human rights of the women and girls that remain in the country and those minorities. mr. secretary, that's where i am going to put my effort. i do think we need an accounting. that's important for history and for us going forward, but let's stop with the hypocrisy about who is to blame. there are a lot of people to blame, and we all share in it. now, mr. secretary, as you know, i was one of those who was opposed to our withdrawing from afghanistan, and i will not revisit that and a lot of my concerns were around the rights of women and girls if afghanistan fell into the hands of the taliban. i want to ask you now, and you have been very specific on briefing calls that you share the concern, and i recognize that you believe it's a priority for this administration to do what you can to protect the rights of women and girls. can you talk specifically about what steps the department is taking to provide for the safety of women and girls and how we are trying to rally the international community behind the effort? >> yes, and thank you, senator. let me just start by thanking you personally for your leadership for a long time now on these issues, both on the sivs, and the work that we have actually been able to do to try and improve the program, but more work needs to be done as well as, of course, on women and girls. from, you know, advancing women's peace and security, that agenda, to ensuring there's an equal playing field for women and girl, you made a huge difference. i have to say over the last 20 years, we have made a big difference collectively in afghanistan, and possibly the biggest difference we made was for women and girls. access to education, and access to health care, and access to work. and opportunity. all of that was as a result of many of the efforts that we made and that this congress made and supported, including with very, very significant assistance. this is -- this is hard. i was in kabul after the president announced his decision. i met with women leaders from the then parliament, ngos and lawyers and human rights defenders and listened to them about their concern for the future, and in the past week i was in doha, i talked to young women that needed evacuated, and heard from them their gratitude for being evacuated and their deep concerns about the future for the women and girls who remain in afghanistan. so with that in mind, we have done a few things and this is what we want to work closely with you and with every member. one, we have worked to rally the international community to set very clear expectations of the taliban going forward. to include the expectation that it will uphold the basic rights of women and girls as well as minorities. that's visible in the statement that more than 100 countries have signed on our initiative, and it's a security counsel resolution that we initiated and got passed. i know people say a security counsel resolution doesn't matter, well, to cite one example, there are significant sanctions from the united nations on the taliban, and there are travel restrictions on the taliban, and the idea that if the taliban is in violation of the security council resolution that we established, it will get any relief just on that alone, the u.n. sanctions or travel restrictions, i think that's pretty clear that won't happen. that's just one point of leverage. we have been working to make sure the international community speaks with one voice and acts together including on this, and that's one. second, we want to make sure that assistance continues to flow. humanitarian assistance, including assistance to the special needs of women and girls, and we are able to do that by working through ngos and the u.n. agencies. i don't want to sugar coat this, because we know that while the taliban seeks and will probably support and protect basic humanitarian assistance through the agencies like for food and medicine, it may be a different story when it comes to things that are directed specifically to women and girls so we will be very focused on that and make sure that assistance can go through and that it's monitored effectively, including by the agencies doing it. i spent sometime talking to the head of the united nations's effort on this, in terms of having a clear monitoring mechanism on this and to carry that forward. next, we will soon appoint at my direction a senior official responsible for focussing and marshaling our efforts on support for women, girls and minorities in afghanistan. it's important that we have a focal point in the u.s. government at the state department whose responsibility is to carry forward this agenda in the weeks and months ahead. >> thank you very much. i am out of time, but can you share with us who that official is as soon as they are appointed? >> yes. >> thank you. >> senator johnson. >> mr. secretary, if i were just to read your testimony not having watched any news, i would literally think this was a smashing success. but i do read the news, as most americans do and we realize this was a complete debacle. i think what concerns me the most among many things is that detachment from reality, and it's the same amount of reality, for example, on the border, a self-inflicted wound, a crisis made by president biden's policies that have completely thrown over our borders and the administration denies we have a problem at the border. i have go