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The president's national security advisor, jake sullivan. but first for our ongoing coverage we are joined by helene cooper, pentagon correspondent for "the new york times," an msnbc contributor, former top state department official rick stengel, now also an msnbc political analyst and paul rieckhoff is here, founder of veterans of america and host of the podcast independent americans. helene, i start with you. if there's any question as to whether or not this president and this white house cease the criticism of this decision, i think it was answered by the president going right at this very ...

800,000 service men, was all misbegotten. the strategy which originally started as counterterrorism and then turned into counterinsurgency and then turned to nation building was ass backward from the start. and that's pretty honest. there aren't many american presidents have said that to the american people because -- and part of the reason is, is that soldiers who made an ultimate sacrifice, they go why did that happen? well, biden is saying because politicians and generals and the elites and foreign policy establishment all said it was worthwhile. well, i don't think it is. that's being very...

Having me. it was a clear effort to knock down critics, but, you know, when you -- he picked the criticisms that he wanted to knock down and kind of left the ones that were a little bit harder for him to knock down. so when he says that, you know, we shoulda, coulda -- the withdrawal could not have been gone -- could not have gone any differently and was going to be chaotic no matter what the united states did, there are elements of truth in that. it's hard to imagine how any sort of ending of a war in afghanistan given the -- and i thought it was pretty extraordinary that he came out straight...

>> can i talk a little bit about what we were just talking about, nicolle. >> please. actually let's do that first and then we'll all come back to terrorism. i'd like your reaction to jake, your reaction to paul and to helene's reporting. take your time. >> yeah. at the risk of seeming like an ivory tower professor, i just want to put the withdrawal in historical context. here's a disastrous withdrawal. when the british left afghanistan in 1842, 4,500 troops left kabul and one englishman 11 days later arrived in jalalabad. that was a disastrous evacuation. here's another one. when the british ...

Line for a government that is corrupt. president biden nodded to that. he's been frustrated with that for years. so that's certainly a criticism that you can knock down. what he didn't address and i found that interesting and i think probably the most of all the criticisms that you've heard about the biden administration handling of this withdrawal, and i think he's right to a certain degree that it would have been chaotic no matter what, you didn't hear president biden addressing the american immigration and visa system and the bureaucracy that has tied up these siv visa applications. he didn...