Against the Clock: Saving America's Afghan Partners

so good afternoon and welcome to this virtual event on afghanistan on america's partners there and on the attempts to save and evacuate them now the taliban is taking control of the country i'm richard fontaine ceo of the center for new american security i know everybody watching today uh is acutely aware of the taliban's capture of kabul the rush of many thousands of americans and afghans to depart the country and the u.s effort that is ongoing at the international airport president biden has said that he will that the united states will evacuate americans afghan helpers that is special immigrant visa holders along with their immediate families and other afghans at special risk from the taliban it's hard to know exactly how many individuals fit into each of these categories but clearly it's in the tens of thousands at least this uh is not of course the first time the united states has been faced with a challenge similar at least in some ways in 1975 the ford administration evacuated more than 100 000 vietnamese refugees to the united states via guam and the u.s airlifted thousands of iraqis and kosovar albanians to safety in 1996 and 1999 respectively but it is obviously a massive undertaking that is uh taking place right now today we're going to spend this session uh reviewing the status of the evacuation the lessons learned from past experiences and where things should go from here and to that end i'm really pleased to have with us uh three individuals with uh direct and and really a unique experience congressman seth moulton of massachusetts is the co-chair of the honoring our promises working group he's a member of the house armed services committee a marine who served four tours in iraq and has been a if not the leader in congress on these issues ambassador richard armitage served as deputy secretary of state during the george w bush administration along with a number of uh distinguished roles in the u.s government in different agencies including the pentagon he served multiple tours in vietnam during his time in the u.s navy and as a civilian he managed the evacuation of 31 000 vietnamese and naval assets before the fall of saigon in 1975 and lisa curtis is senior fellow and director of the indo-pacific security program here at cnas she served until january as deputy assistant to the president and national security council senior director for south and central asia and among other things participated in the negotiations with the taliban so thank you uh the three of you for joining us particularly at this important time congressman moulton maybe i can start with you and um and ask two questions first what's your understanding of where things stand right now and then second how did we get here well richard first of all thank you very much for having me to all the cnas crew it's it's good to be back and uh there couldn't be a more timely uh moment to discuss uh what's happening right now in afghanistan you know i've said for a long time now that we're not going to win the war in afghanistan but there are devastating ways we could lose and we see several of those unfolding before us today the idea that we would depart afghanistan in chaos and leave so many of our allies behind goes against all our values and it goes against the promises that people like myself made on the ground to people in places like iraq and afghanistan when we asked them to trust us to work with us we knew they were risking their lives we knew they were putting their lives in our hands but we said we've got you we've got your back and we're not going to leave you behind and yet the course that we are on today suggests we're going to leave a lot of these people behind the current status is that the united states now has more troops in afghanistan at kabul airport than we had in the entire country just a few weeks ago more troops and they're under much greater threat because we've so badly mismanaged our retreat the president has promised to get all american citizens out by the end of august but we don't seem to have a very clear plan to do so and notably he has not said we will get all of our afghan allies out before we leave teams like mine on capitol hill have been fielding requests from all over the country and all over the world veterans reaching out to us aid workers diplomats trying to find someone who can simply get their people on a list i was up after midnight last night when a spreadsheet finally came in from someone on the ground at the state department in kabul i quickly woke up my team and they got to work filling names into this new spreadsheet so that people could simply get through the gate when they come and meet the marines between them and the taliban i mean the simple idea that we have the taliban between american citizens and u.s marines at the airport and therefore we're relying on the goodwill of the taliban to save our people is extraordinary and shameful all at once and i can't emphasize enough how quickly this could go further south the chaos outside the gate is so bad right now that women and children are being crushed literally to death people are dying just waiting to get into the airport but the taliban could start massacring people at any moment there are already reports that they're going house to house around the country starting to hang government officials assassinate people they thought were collaborators or work with the afghan security forces and we can only expect that taliban campaign to continue and expand thank god it hasn't taken place literally outside the airport gates but that could start at any moment and the reason we got here fundamentally look we can spend a lot of time and i'm sure cnass will host many events to debate whether or not we should have withdrawn from afghanistan or tried to maintain the status quo with a small troop presence there but now is not the time for that debate the bottom line is that the president made his decision to withdraw but people like myself have been calling for months both before but especially after he made that decision to start this evacuation one of my worst fears was that our efforts in congress to expand the special immigrant visa program would in fact distract from the need to conduct an immediate evacuation and that's why i have kept my focus on the evacuation i laid out a plan two months ago served up on a platter for the administration to get people to guam after asking them for weeks for a plan and receiving nothing when secretary austin and chairman milly came before the house armed services committee two months ago my first question to them was why have you not begun the evacuation already if we had started getting these people out our citizens and our allies if we had started that months ago we would not see the chaos unfolding outside the gate today that's one small but significant way in which we could have made this better and the current disaster could have been avoided i look forward to this panel discussion because i have consulted with mr armitage several times over the past couple months for his own advice on how to get this right and i have to say his track record is better than ours so far so we have a lot to learn today and i look forward to the discussion all right thank you uh let's uh go to ambassador armitage um the comparison of the week at least is to the fall of saigon you were in saigon during the fall and were responsible for evacuating literally tens of thousands of south vietnamese to safety maybe i can ask you one how much does this resonate with the experience that we had before and are there a couple of lessons that we could still absorb for how a successful evacuation then could help us improve the situation now thank you richard and thank you captain morton for your comments uh i appreciate it uh the similarities between vietnam and afghanistan i think begin with the fact that in both cases they were goat rodeos uh they were not planned out very well uh everyone is making things up on the fly and that appears to be the case that we face now second is in both cases uh we were perceived as cutting and running uh the decision for instance in afghanistan i personally think it was the right decision but the timing and the manner of affecting the evacuation are just all fubar as far as i can see and third and biggest similarity that i see between uh vietnam and and afghanistan is the fact that we've come a cropper on the same issue it wasn't that vietnamese or afghans couldn't fight god knows it's all they do from the time their children god knows they know how to shoot the question was whether the corrupt governments in saigon and in kabul were worth the sacrifice of their soldiers and of their people and apparently the answer is not now there are a lot of other other things that that uh crop up their similarities and dissimilarities uh there is however uh one point i would like to make i think kevin moulton's probably on the same wavelength this is this is insane to try to have sivs for these people who served with us alongside us and the rest of their lives with us the only way to affect this properly would be to bring as many people out as possible and sort them out later whether it's at guam whether it's in gutter it doesn't matter but short amount at our leisure so i'll uh contend myself with those comments i'm richard and we can uh talk more later all right um thank you lisa let me go to you um and ask maybe a broader question um you know a lot now at least at the moment turns on i hate to say the goodwill of the taliban but at least uh their ability to not uh hinder people that are trying to get to the airport to not start the kind of reprisal killings or the massacres that congressman moulton said um could be on offer at any moment i mean you were in the room negotiating with these folks they're branding themselves the last few days is sort of not your father's taliban they're more moderate now and all these things i mean do you do you believe that or do you have a sense of of how they will rule once they consolidate power well thank you richard first let me just talk about the evacuation and how important it is for the us um credibility and and the fact that the us has a moral responsibility to settle as many afghans to get those afghans out of the country those who supported our mission who believed in the mission we need to get them out get them to safety i was slightly encouraged that president biden hinted that he could extend the timeline of having us troops on the ground there uh and in hopes that that means that um the administration will commit to getting this done committing the resources that are necessary i think this is one way it's been uh our country has taken such a hit with its global credibility over this that at least we should show that we are not completely abandoning those afghan partners that supported us and that we are going to put the resources and the time the effort that is necessary to get them out of the country safely and resettled now with regard to the taliban they have been saying all the right things right the uh leader the the spokesperson zabiola mujit on tuesday made a point of saying we're going to allow women to work we're going to allow girls to go to school we're not going to engage in reprisal killings but the the problem is we have to look at the actions and not just listen to the words that the taliban is saying and i think representative moulton made very clear that uh we are seeing some of these uh reprisal killings we're also seeing that women weren't let into a university in herat we're seeing that a lot of schools are being closed down and girls are not being able to go to school so i think we we really need to to wait and watch and see if the taliban's actions will match their words and this goes also for the issue of uh terrorism i think that uh we still see the links between taliban and al qaeda uh we saw that jails were emptied uh putting you know hundreds maybe thousands of um al qaeda isis other terrorists on the streets you know if you consider the fact that we invested billions and and uh you know hundreds of military intelligence operations to get those people in jail and now they're just uh roaming free there's a lot of concerns about a terror safe haven re-emerging there so i think before there's any decision to even consider recognizing the taliban or providing them any you know international legitimacy uh we need to look at these two things what are they doing on the ground with regard to human rights women's rights are they sincerely avoiding reprisal killings how are they treating the population and then also what are they doing with regard to the terrorists that we know are there in afghanistan so i think there's a lot of questions that remains and we can't take the taliban at face value great um i wanted to let uh folks who are tuning in know that if you want to ask a question you could put it in the question box and we'll try to get to your questions for the speakers if you have them uh congressman moulton i want to very shortly get to some specifics on what we do now but one last question on the prelude to this moment the two sort of arguments against i suppose having uh done what you advocated for for so long one is well there weren't that many people that actually wanted to leave and then two uh had the united states been seen as starting a mass evacuation would have provoked a crisis in confidence the government the government would have fell so it was prudent not to do that do you accept either of those uh reasons for or is it absolutely not i mean the first is is patently absurd there's been a backlog of special special immigrant visa applications for literally years says before i came to congress that's why i've been fighting since i came to congress in 2015 to expand the program i mean we all saw the images around the world of people literally clinging to airplanes to get out of kabul so don't tell me they don't want to go now on the second point would it have precipitated a quicker fall the united states of the afghan government i mean obviously that's a completely moot point now it's almost silly to talk about it but the point is that we could have had an orderly evacuation if we had started earlier and so if you were shipping out a few hundred a day then no you wouldn't have had a crisis in confidence because frankly people wouldn't even have known it was happening it would be totally different than the chaos we see on the ground right now right um let me congressman let me ask you also now shifting uh over to okay now what um there's a whole number of policy decisions that the administration needs to make very quickly one is related to this uh self-imposed august 31st deadline um do you think so the first question is do you think that that uh if the president said we'll stay beyond that or suggest we'll stay beyond that if american all americans are left uh he didn't say that with respect to afghans afghan helpers sivs so do you think that the presence on the ground at the airport should stay past august 31st if there are afghans who still have not been evacuated and then two they have this categories if you have americans you have sivs and their families you have this other categories which at least of my knowledge has not yet been defined of at special risk from the taliban how would you go about defining that i mean should this be an operation that goes on to anyone who would like to leave can leave or how do you think about that so richard on the first question uh let me be clear i've been very publicly calling on the president over the last week to make a clear commitment to stay until this mission is complete but that's not a new call for me i've been making that for several months as well since the whole operation to withdraw from afghanistan began i made it clear that the administration must commit to staying until we can get everyone out so that hasn't changed and it's shocking to me that we still have not learned the lesson about putting lines in the sand based on dates we should have conditions based withdrawals so i think it's terribly disappointing that the august 31st date ever came up in discussion we should leave when this is done now on the uh on the uh on the second question uh in terms of the different categories of people i mean look this is a big problem but it goes back to uh ambassador armitage's point which is that we need to do the vetting after we get them out we need to sort out the details once they're in a safe place the fact that people are dying literally just trying to get into the gate of the airport is a humanitarian disaster of our own fault we need to get them out first sort out the paperwork later the system that the administration the paper in the state department has set up today means that someone could be denied entry to the airport denied a flight out of kabul literally due to a typo in their paperwork no one should ever die because of a typo ambassador army just let me uh go to you on a couple of these things so one um to the point about well i i guess i'll ask whether you uh it's your belief that the operation should continue until essentially anyone who would like to leave can leave um and then determine identities in vetting and everything uh somewhere else and then two and this is directly on the congressman's point about bureaucracy and typos and everything my understanding of uh what happened in vietnam and and your role in particular was um there wasn't a lot of bureaucracy involved in that in that evacuation in fact most of it was being improvised on the ground people like you who were going to ask for forgiveness later rather than permission in advance and how much of that do you think should have a role here well the latter question first richard i think that should be uh according to prominent role uh we ought to get people out and worry about it later uh congressman molten is correct dying for a typo seems to me uh just absurd um second i think that president biden should could be willing to consider staying on i know that left to their own devices uh had things been a day or two slower with the taliban getting into kabul i would bet that the u.s military was going to put up a court sanitare uh in some sort of diameter around kabul and basically threaten the taliban with airstrikes military force etc if they interfered uh i don't think that's quite possible right now but i think it is quite possible to stay as long as we have to until we've gotten the majority of people out i do not think we'll get all of them out and i don't think the taliban 2.0 is going to allow all those who want to get into the airport to do so uh they may put a good face forward in kabul but in jalalabad kandahar mazari sharif i'd like to see what face they're putting forward let me just follow up with you on the point about the court and sanitaire or lack thereof so obviously there's the airport and getting in and then there's getting to the airport even for those who live in kabul of course that does that you know afghanistan's a big country and not everyone lives in kabul but is there a role for the united states the u.s military beyond what the administration has said which is essentially that they're asking the taliban to allow safe passage of these people to the airport well i would say that if we had knowledge of a group of people within four five six seven miles of the airport it may very well be worth the us military's time effort and the risk to try to get the majority of those people in and i think that's eminently doable and possible the idea of according to sanitarian was fine before sunday when the taliban just walked in and now that's no longer on the on the table uh second record if i may we seem to still think that there's huge value to the taliban by being recognized by the united states well wait a minute we should recognize the taliban based on their behavior on their governance on their respect for human rights and human freedoms but right now in my view they don't give a damn whether the united states recognizes them or not they're winners and they've got pakistan iran to some extent russia and china in their corner right now uh so i don't think they're in a wild harry that would give us that much more leverage uh but perhaps i'm uh misinformed congressman let me ask you about this question about u.s military role or u.s government role outside the airport secretary austin said yesterday doesn't have the capability to do anything but secure the airport so one do you think something else should be done outside the perimeter of the airport by anyone involved in the us government two would that take if it was military would that take additional capability richard we're the united states of america we absolutely have the capacity to do more than just cordon the airport uh so secretary austin is flat out wrong uh when he says that he and he should know better i mean that if we want to do more we could now there's a legitimate question as to whether that's the right decision uh you know it's going to put more american lives at risk there already are a lot of american lives at risk on the ground right now but it is absolutely within our capability to do more and i don't think it sends a good message i don't think it sent the right message to the taliban to say that we're incapable of putting more pressure on them uh or or doing other things so i i completely disagree with that you know the other thing that's going on right now is the state department is really the organization that's holding up uh the exfiltration of refugees of both american citizens and uh and afghans who are just simply trying to get into the gate because they're the ones who are insisting on this bureaucracy uh that both richard and i think should should go away and be sorted out later so i recently received an update i mean literally just a few minutes ago from the state department that they have 20 consular office officers on the ground in kabul and wait for a minute wait for it they're surging to 40 40 consular officers this is the greatest foreign policy disaster that we've seen in a very long time and they're sending 40 people to deal with it i mean that's absurd we've got 6 000 troops on the ground we need a little bit more effort than 40 consular officers from the united states state department lisa um let me go to you for a minute uh everyone who has been even tangentially involved in afghanistan over the years is getting calls and emails from desperate people who want to get out or whose family members would like to get out you and i have been on some email changes including just a couple of hours ago um and some of these folks are well outside of kabul you know huge risks that they're going to try to make it to the airport and what is your view on what the u.s government role should be in that set of issues well i agree with representative moulton we should be pouring all of the resources at our disposal on this evacuation and uh putting more people that are necessary both for the processing uh but also for the security and i just want to note here that there are so many uh private citizens working on this issue as richard mentioned we're getting so many emails calls out i was also up at midnight last night getting a frantic calls uh people you know right outside the airport unable to get in getting injured stampeded uh providing coordinates that i can then provide to somebody that i know is on the ground and and trying to help these people so our military uh can be doing more to push out that perimeter uh you know if they have to um negotiate something with the taliban that can be done uh but there there are people who are getting to the airport they're they're getting very very close but then they're being held back by the taliban they even have flights that they're manifested on that are leaving without them because of this issue so the real bottleneck right now is is right outside the airport and getting people on and and having us military assets and resources focused on this um getting to those people who are in need uh and and who need help actually getting into the airport this this is really the the fundamental problem right now um that i'm hearing about and that that needs to be addressed lisa let me follow up so there's a question from uh lauren in the audience who asks if we're negotiating if we were negotiating directly with the taliban in doha until very recently do not we have or do we not have an ability to carry out and complete the necessary negotiations to accomplish a full evacuation of all persons us afghan and others so um this gets back to a little bit of what was discussed before but uh there are obvious points of contact with taliban leadership is this uh something we can negotiate well i think ambassador armitage made the point that the taliban feel victorious uh there there are lines of communication open obviously we've been hearing that but at the same time you know they've moved from doha into kabul you know they they no longer have um you know the the interest in in being outside of afghanistan so there's no doha negotiations to speak of the taliban leadership has moved into kabul they're victorious uh so we have a lot less leverage now obviously um but that's not to say that that we shouldn't uh continue uh to try to uh convince them that you know it's it's in their interest not to have these um confrontations this violence you know people of pictures of people you know bloodied um and and the violence so we need to keep the engagement going um get as many afghans into the airport out of the country as possible convince the taliban that that is in their interest uh but at the same time we have to be realistic uh we we have very little leverage at this point um and you know uh perhaps there uh should have been uh something you know uh in the negotiations earlier uh which dealt with this issue but again i don't think anybody foresaw the speed with which the taliban would be able to take over the country and we can talk about how that happened what contributed to it i think there are several um issues that that have come into play um i think both the the trump administration and the biden administration bear some responsibility for this catastrophe uh the doha agreement that was negotiated by the trump administration was very weak uh it undermined the afghan government uh there therefore when the u.s decided to pull out all its troops out uh the afghan security forces were demoralized um and so you know i think there there is a lot of study that needs to go into how did this happen what contributed to it and uh i think it's very important so we don't uh repeat this god forbid in the future ambassador armand let me uh turn to you there's a question from kim who's asked how can citizens and veterans help with the safe evacuation of our afghan allies and sivs and their families in terms of resources influence advocacy or other ways and and i might actually just extend that question just a little bit because i think there's some direct lessons that may be drawn upon from the vietnam experience which is you know these these folks are starting to arrive already i talked this morning with someone a former colleague of mine who was sponsoring a family uh an interpreter and and his wife and six children have arrived in north carolina they're starting to arrive in different places uh it's gonna be a new experience for these people uh to live in the united states or wherever they end up and and you know what um what's the best approach to sort of the day after once once some of these people do uh get to another shore well richard i think that uh one of the first things that americans can do is make sure their elected representatives know that not all american spirit influence of afghan refugees and just like the vietnamese they can be a great addition to the fabric of our society second i think there are ngos lutheran church services and others who are already very active in the resettlements etc i think also that we have to spend some serious time uh having uh local islamic communities local mowers talk to the incoming afghan refugees the reason i value this is the vietnamese were literate people are surprised about that but because of colonialism they had mandatory sixth grade education in many cases our taliban refugees won't be the vietnamese were coming to a country which had some familiarity with religion with their religions the afghans are a little different in fact they're coming to a country which enjoys or uh in in disrepute uh the fact that we are not always seen as open to islamists etc so i think there were both monetary issues with ngos there are political issues with members of congress and there are practical local issues that we can get involved with my family sponsored as richard knows 40 odd vietnamese over the years uh and there's nothing wrong with it it's not so expensive it doesn't disrupt your life in fact it may vastly enrich it because as john dunn reminded us we're all involved in humankind yeah well said um congressman moulton there's a a question from casey wootenwood national journal is there anything additional that congress can do legislatively to speed up the visa process i mean yes there is um but again i'm i'm worried about taking too much action on the visa process what we need to be doing right now is throwing out the visa process at least on the ground in kabul so my effort when i get to washington on monday will not be focused on changing the visa process but on making sure that the visa process takes place once we get people to safety the biggest thing that we can do though is make it clear that it's not just people who qualify for the existing special immigrant visa who need to get out there are a lot of people who don't fit in neatly into those categories but nonetheless are under tremendous threat uh from the taliban including uh academics who uh led the charge to let women go to school uh who uh led the charge to uh liberalize and and uh free society in afghanistan and therefore have values that run directly counter uh to the taliban they're going to be under threat uh people who were just associated with uh us military members uh i'm in touch with uh someone uh who worked for the us military and is uh deathly afraid for his brother uh because his brother has been targeted uh as an afghan government official and as the brother of someone who worked with the americans so there are a lot of people that are under a dire threat we need to get out and don't fit neatly in these categories there's work we can do to do that but the bottom line right now is we just need to get them through the gate let me follow up with you on uh a question actually it's related to um your fort taurus in iraq when you worked with local partners and interpreters and people there and and obviously as much as we would like to think that this is the last war i don't think we can assume that and uh we will want local partners in the future um you know you congressman you've articulated i think very articulately the heart reason to to do this because of the moral uh imperative the obligation we have to the people who worked with us and beyond those people but there's a head reason it seems to me as well which is you know we don't want uh to be known uh as the people who work with local partners and leave them behind to suffer their fate as they will um but that's a kind of an overarching theoretical point do you do you think that actually applies on the ground do you think the next iraq or afghanistan god forbid when we're looking or syria and we're looking for local partners the way that what unfolded now is going to resonate i mean what happens if we don't do this well absolutely this matters uh it has huge implications for the next several decades of american national security for the simple ability of people like myself as a young captain or lieutenant on the ground in a place like iraq or afghanistan to get partners and allies to get people to work uh work with us to help us with our mission by the way it's not just the us military it's our intelligence agencies it's our diplomats even our contractors anyone who needs local help around the globe i remember one of these conversations that i had with one of my very first translators in iraq when he came to the gate as he did every day but this morning he said seth i can't work with you anymore they came to my house last night they threatened to kill me and my family if i continued working with the americans and over the course of the next couple hours knowing how important the work we were doing was i did everything i could to convince muhammad to keep working with me and i succeeded he took great risk to flaunt the threats of the terrorists and put his faith and trust in me and that's because i said i'm an american we're going to do whatever it takes to keep you and your family safe we've got your back and importantly we won't leave you behind i got muhammad to america several years later when his life was under even greater threat he's now here as a proud united states citizen actually serving the country but we got to this point because he believed in that promise that i made and the next time someone tries to make that promise a young american soldier or marine or intelligence officer anywhere in the globe people are going to look to what's going on in afghanistan today when they decide whether or not to work with us lisa um let me turn to you for a question from dr wayne schroeder how do you view the roles of former president hubbard karzai and dr abdullah in meeting with taliban leaders well look i i come back to ambassador armitage's point again that the taliban have been victorious you know i'm not sure what they're discussing but the taliban are in such a powerful position now that you know i'm not sure what these kinds of talks accomplish if they can perhaps get something you know for the people of afghanistan on the human rights front or um something of that nature that that's fine but i think the the time has passed for any kind of power sharing the taliban don't need to power share so unfortunately i think that the the pursuit of this interim government idea which the u.s negotiator pushed for a long time uh actually contributed to the divisions among the political leadership among ghani abdul abdullah karzai and others and so that's part of the the weakness uh in the political system that we have observed and again contributed to sort of the overall collapse of the system that we saw over the last week so i don't have a lot of confidence in the negotiations that are happening with taliban now i think the dye has been cast they have succeeded in what they were trying to do which was you know basically gain legitimacy by pretending they were interested in the peace process at the same time they were pushing militarily and sort of weakening the overall system uh in this parallel effort and it was uh obviously quite an effective strategy that they pursued and and i'm sorry that the us was sort of duped into um you know being a part of it i think that the again the the peace process was very unsuccessful failed to bring any modicum of a peace process or a power sharing settlement and again that's on both administrations and you know we'll be looking at this for a long time to come but i'm sorry to say i don't have a lot of confidence in these continuing negotiations that are happening with uh karzai and abdul abdullah and the taliban at this point lisa what do you make of the argument okay there's uh international recognition u.s recognition diplomatic recognition that could be used as a lever okay we've addressed that but there's also the money side of things 80 of the afghan government budget was from international donations imf has frozen uh afghanistan funds the fed has frozen afghanistan funds um they now have a country to run one hears on the one hand that actually is a source of leverage we could use those um in order to you know get some satisfaction on human rights or something like that alternatively they're going to dominate taxation and and the poppy trade and all kinds of other things they're not going to need to go to the imf as the taliban in exchange for you know concessions on women's rights or something like that do you have a sense for that well i think there there are still tools at our disposal and we have to try to use them and we have to work in concert with like-minded partners look china russia pakistan you know they may rush to to recognize the taliban you know they don't really care about human rights civil rights in the country but our uk partners i would point you to prime minister johnson's speech just the other day very powerful speech that he gave to the british parliament um on the need to condition any future recognition of the taliban and what our expectations should be uh so the uk the eu partners um we need to work together and figure out a strategy of how we could potentially potentially try to shape uh you know how the taliban is going to treat its own population what it's going to do toward the terrorists that we that we know are there on the ground in afghanistan so i think there are tools that we can use but we we have to be very careful and we we may well in fact we have to continue to get humanitarian assistance to the afghan people so we're going to have to work with the taliban at some level to make sure that the afghan people are protected from a potential humanitarian catastrophe but we can still sanction taliban leaders for atrocities that um are committed against afghan civilians in fact i've called for uh sanctions on taliban leaders for the assassination of the the former government state media chief which happened just two weeks ago so again when we're looking at okay who is the taliban now um are they going to respect human rights are they going to avoid reprisal killings we have to remember just a few weeks ago they were on a campaign of assassinations of civil society leaders human rights workers journalists so i hope they have changed i hope they're going to stand by their commitment to not engage in reprisal killings but i think we we have all the reason to be very skeptical um ambassador armitage i want to ask you about this uh the question that i posed to the congressman about credibility in the future with potential local partners you've seen a lot of these kind of issues whether it's the kurds or afghanistan vietnam you know this is always a difficult way to end uh things do you agree that our future credibility and the ability of you know someone in the field to get local help and support turns at least in part on what they understand to be the past commitments or lack thereof richard i think congressman moulton got it right we are the united states of america we are temporarily dislocated and our credibility gap is not just a matter of refugees fleeing afghanistan it's a longer developed developing situation part of it was the previous administration uh part of it is our uh ability of two administrations to get a handle on covet part of it is our uh coup attempt of six january and now of course we are seen as abandoning our allies so i think the only way [Music] to get out of this hole is first of all to stop digging and to stop digging means we've got to start again consulting with our allies the brits come to mind immediately number two we've got to be seen as the us military as u.s government heavily involved in trying to save people's lives to be faithful to our word and we've got to be seen as being involved that way and this is not going to be in a year or two to get this credibility back but it's not necessarily the case that it has gone forever congressman we're i have just a few minutes left uh there's a question from daniel flatly at bloomberg this is in a way probably brings me back because i wanted to ask you to sort of sum up what you believe the immediate next step should be so the question is what does the us need to do at this point to give get everyone out by august 31st i suspect your answer is forget about august 31st um for starters is that a realistic timeline what would success look like in this situation so um is it you know in addition to you said you know forget august 31st focus on the mission uh forget visas visa processing in afghanistan do visa processing outside of afghanistan evacuate as many people as we can deploy the military necessary to carry out this mission and include at least contemplating doing something outside the airport depending on the situation is that a fair summation of what you think is the sort of immediate next steps and is there anything else that you would add to that list you know richard i should get you on my team because you've done a good job of answering the question for me yeah i did work on the hill for a while i think you've summarized it well you know the one thing i would add and i'd have to defer to lisa on the on the prospects for this is um we've gone through a lot of reasons why we don't have leverage over the taliban it would be great to try to find some places where we might some levers we might be able to pull to uh extract uh what essentially amounts to a bit more uh a few more favors from them and just helping uh get people out uh because sadly uh i mean it's pretty pathetic but we are dependent on them at this point uh to get people through the country through kabul uh to that airport gate and then at that point uh it's up to us to get them through the gate and onto airplanes to safety there's a question about um one or two credible organizations that are doing um jobs of resettling and helping people from afghanistan in just a moment when we wrap we'll put up a slide that has some suggestions it'll also have the uh contact at the state department for folks there who are building the database of at-risk afghans uh and you know uh so we'll have we'll have that up and uh we can talk through that for a second but um as we close ambassador armitage maybe i can close with you and um you know it it strikes me maybe i could just ask you to reflect on my uh my observation it's it strikes me that we're at one of these rare moments of history where we will either look back at this operation forget how afghanistan went as a war whether the decision the policy decision to stay or go also but at this particular operation either as a source of great pride or great shame in the future we look back on the evacuation that you led from saigon and there's literally people to this day making academy award nominated films about what you and they did on the ground because we see this as a source of pride 46 years later is that how this feels right now are we at one of those moments where what we do over the next few days is going to be remembered for ill or for good and and as a country will either take pride or shame in what happens for decades i take a great deal of pride already in the service of our uh service members who have passed uh in afghanistan and that that'll never be taken away i cannot think if we continue down the same path that we'll be looking back and pride in fact the vietnam operation to which you referred richard was aided to vetted by people like lionel rosenblatt and colonel mike island all uh rogue radical elements doing their own thing because the us government wasn't taking possession wasn't taking cognizance of this effort so it was a bunch of free-floating radicals that got it done and unless we turn around and i think it frankly it involves the use of some military force and are seen as moving heaven earth to be truthful to our word that we are not going to be able to look back with pride on this moment but as i say i look back with pride on those who have served and those who have sacrificed i'm proud of them i'm proud of their service and i love them for it absolutely congressman walton ambassador armitage lisa curtis thank you all for joining us um in just a second actually if the folks listening to this shy and company can put up the slide with some organizations we'll just close out for those who are interested in uh learning more you can make me off the screen and make that bigger so people could actually read it you have obviously unhcr the international rescue committee women for women international no one left behind lutheran social services and then in the bottom right you see the contact email for the state department group task force that is uh managing this and building the databases of at-risk uh afghans hopefully for evacuation each of these does different things but at least that's a starting point for anyone who's interested in doing more again thank you so much to our speakers uh thanks to those who tuned in for this and joined otherwise and uh we'll have more to come soon thanks thanks again thank you

Channel: Center for a New American Security (CNAS)

Views: 455

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: defense, foreign policy, national security, cnas, china, international relations, diplomacy, technology

Id: 8Pp7l458B38

Length: 54min 30sec (3270 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021