the hurricane. this waiver is accompanied by additional safety-related reporting requirements to monitor driver working hours. epa has approved emergency fuel waivers for louisiana and mississippi effective immediately, which will expand the supply of gasoline that can be sold in these two states and increase availability at this critical time. we are continuing to assess and will continue to provide you all updates. why don t you kick it off, josh? good to see you. two subjects, first on afghanistan. the president said that any additional evacuations will go through diplomatic channels and that the united states has a leverage over the taliban. can you tell us what those channels look like and what kind of leverage the united states has? absolutely. well, first i would say i would point you to the remarks that the secretary of state provided last night, but let me give you some highlights of that. we have enormous leverage over the taliban including access to the global marketplac
or thank you all for your service, because so many of these afghans, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, have worked closely, have fought alongside and have died alongside american military service men and women over the past 20 years. and so i do think you will likely get some kind of response from afghanistan as the news of that speech trickles out, jake. so, dana bash, president biden 13 days ago said that they would get every american out by august 31st and would stay longer if every american wasn t out. obviously events overtook them. there was a terrorist attack, and the president said that it was the unanimous advice of his military and civilian advisers to withdraw august 31st. he said in addition in his speech just now that 90% of the americans who wanted to get out would get out and the
why those remaining folks didn t. some changed their mind at the last minute. some wanted to bring very large extended family who were not americans who couldn t get through checkpoints. some may have shown up at the airport, although i have to tell you i m not familiar, and general mckenzie said he was not familiar with anyone being turned away at the gate last minute. but the fact is that we went out of our way for two full weeks to create the circumstances for any american who wanted to get to the airport and get on a plane to do so. and the question the president ultimately faced was how long do i keep u.s. marines in harm s way with threats escalating hour by hour? how many more days do i do that? he ultimately decided it was right to end it and to shift to a diplomatic mission. and we have plenty of leverage with the taliban to help effectuate the safe passage of any further americans who want to leave afghanistan. how are you going to get the americans and u.s. legal permanent
complex, and for americans, an enormously foreign place. there may not be a more complex and foreign place on the face of the earth than afghanistan. so when we went in, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we went in with a sense of urgency because we weren t sure that the attacks on 9/11 were the last attacks. in fact, there was some intelligence suggesting that there was more to come. so we rushed in and we accomplished our immediate goal, which was to displace the taliban, to cause al qaeda to flee mostly into pakistan. and then we were left with the rest of the problem in afghanistan. and my comments to the inspector general reflected that in my experience at the ten-year mark of personally working on this problem. so 2011? well, for me a few years after that. but when i had accumulated ten years, i was still learning things that were fundamental to the underlying conditions in afghanistan. i was learning things about the
white house press secretary jen psaki is going to begin briefing in a second. and when she does we re going to take at least the top of the remarks. but before psaki begins we are in a period where people are taking a look back at the 20 years. and craig whitlock from the washington post got reports on this. and you have a very potent quote in that. you told the inspector general for afghanistan in 2015, quote, we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of afghanistan. we didn t know what we were doing. what are we trying to do here? we didn t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. if the american people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction 2,400 lives lost. you called it a fundamental lack of knowledge that the u.s. had about afghanistan. did the u.s. ever really come to understand afghanistan? well, first of all, afghanistan is an enormously