General Asked: 'Who Actually Ordered The Strike' In Kabul By Drone That Killed 10 Civilians

lucas tomlinson fox news did you have forces on the ground that helped you conduct this strike no we did not uh as you know no time were our forces really away from uh from amid karzai international airfield so there was nobody there nobody there on the ground to to have to play that role i think you can see from the graphic that the position of the strike was about three to four kilometers to the west of hkia so no there was there were there was nobody either us or a proxy of ours that was involved in this that includes special operations forces explicitly can you talk about the challenges conducting these drone strikes without any u.s troops on the ground we conducted a very successful drone strike two days earlier up in nagerhar province and uh we got the target and i think that had a significant event on dislocating and suppressing isis k's ability to attack us during this period of time so we actually had success with that this one we did not have success with success with and we've been very clear about owning up to our responsibility in this regard lucas you've had three questions uh we've got time for just a couple more uh tara cop thank you general mckenzie tara cop with defense one since there are no more u.s forces on the ground how would the ex-grad ship payments be provided to surviving family members if they are provided and then i know you walked us through the timeline at the beginning of this but can you give us the the overall amount of time spent actually identifying and confirming this target before us the strike was taken sure so as for the extraction payments we're working that right now and it will be difficult as i noted in my remarks i think or one of the first questions it'll be difficult to do that without a presence on the ground and that's just something we're going to have to work through i don't have a better answer for you right now other than i we recognize the obligation and we'll continue to work we'll continue to work that problem so in a situation like this to go to the second part of your question as you continue to look at the target over the course of the day you know you begin to build probabilities and you begin to you begin to uh you begin to weigh if are we going to take a strike why why are we going to take the strike when the vehicle came up to the final point at 0.7 on your map which is actually as i've noted as close the closest to the airfield it had been all day we were very concerned about a white corolla being involved in a in an attack so the cumulative force of all those uh all those the intelligence that we gathered throughout the day the position of the vehicle its nearness to the airport the eminence of the threat and the other uh sick ant that we're getting throughout the day all led us to the moment of deciding to take the strike and and one last follow-up who actually ordered the strike who had the final authority to save fire so in this case the target engagement authority is held by the over the horizon uh commander who's forward in the theater the over the horizon strike sale commander i should say okay we have time for one more and then we're gonna have to let the general go jeff seldon voa jeff seldom from voa thanks very much for doing this general um given how this over the horizon strike went where do things stand in terms of getting at least a closer presence a closer basing agreement for future over the horizon strikes and we've been told that the taliban made various commitments to counter terrorism i know you said that they didn't provide any information for this strike but did they provide any sort of help in the closing days in terms of preventing the threat against uh from isis k or have they been helpful since then in cracking down on isis k as they continue to uh plot against u.s western targets so i think the the best i can answer your question is to sort of take the middle part of the question in the final days and really in the second half of our uh of our time at hkia as we continued our evacuation the taliban were helpful in establishing an outer security perimeter which actually we believe prevented some attacks from developing now look there's a downside to that too it also allowed them to screen people that might otherwise have gotten to the airfield and that's just a hard harsh fact and you have to balance those two force protection of our forces which is supported by taliban external presence against the fact that it may prevent some people that you would like to bring out from being able to get to you unmolested and that's a difficult balance i i frankly came down that i wanted to protect our forces and i needed that outer boundary and to that degree we were able to work together i have no uh i have no particular affection for the taliban and i don't know that they're doing anything at all for us right now but those questions would probably better go to the department of state along with questions about basing and where we might be able to get closer basing than where we are right now i know all those things are actively being worked by our diplomats as we speak thank you general appreciate your time this afternoon i'll turn it over to you for any last closing comments you might want to make sir no john i uh i just i appreciate the opportunity to come on i appreciate the opportunity to take responsibility for this because i do feel responsible for it and i appreciate the questions from the from the media thanks john general thank you very much

Channel: Forbes Breaking News

Views: 435,518

Keywords: Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, drone, Kabul

Id: obPOsNRNirg

Length: 5min 19sec (319 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021