and welcome back to abc news live well tarp department of defense officials our military press getting ready to resume testifying to congress on the u.s withdrawal of afghanistan as we wait for that to start live there on capitol hill let's bring in abc news national security and defense analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the middle east mick mulroy also former u.s army ranger jericho deadman for more on this while we wait for it to start jericho let's start with you yo
u know you were an army arranger army ranger you have been in country uh during both wars you've been following what's been happening here on the hill i'm just curious after yesterday and the back and forth of what military leaders were saying about keeping troops in afghanistan versus what the president had publicly said on our network that there was a contradicting i guess you should say what military leaders are saying what are other men and women saying to you after yesterday about what they
heard and observed as someone who was involved in the tactical fights there overseas for us it's just another chapter in the same story of uh you know different different chains of command different administrations kicking this can down the road uh and then renaming or reframing the parameters of success and then saying we've turned a new corner every year or two um so so for me and for us it was it was highly disappointing and showed the level of scrutiny and the level of attention that's bein
g paid to afghanistan but by every administration who who's who's been in the chair since since the war start what did you not hear yesterday that you want to hear today i would like to hear a lot less about the evacuation that you know encompassed 17 days give or take of the entirety of this board i want to i want to talk more about 20 years of again every administration every chain of command kicking the can around the corner and and just you know hoping it would go away mick as they gavel in
what do you want to hear today that you didn't hear yesterday so i want to hear exactly what jericho just said uh yes the evacuation is worthy of reviewing but the 20 years of war there is more worthy of the time i think we need to spend a lot of time talking about what we did what we did right what we did wrong and why we didn't keep a residual force there to preserve everything we fought for and i think that's going to be the the main part of today i also think they're going to talk about how
we're going to conduct counterterrorism operations there in the future i've sent i spent over two years on the ground fighting and conducting counterterrorism operations there and i can tell you it's going to be very very difficult and i think the generals have proven that they're very blunt when it comes to their assessment of the future and we really need to get into uh how we're going to be able to conduct this and how we're going to be able to keep our nation safe and just put that in perspe
ctive you don't have ct efforts and good intel we could easily see another 911 with the taliban now in control mick that makes it very difficult for us especially with no boots on the ground there to know what's happening to know what's thriving there to know about extremist groups and jihadists that are able to flourish and be protected so going forward what do you want to hear from the questions with regard to how military brass will deal with ct with counterterrorism and trying to prevent the
growth of extremists uh in a country that they just flourished 20 years ago well that's exactly right cara so the real question is going to be what are you going to do to make up for the lack of intelligence collection on the ground we had an extraordinarily complex network of collection that we had there it's now completely dissipated it doesn't matter if you have all the most sophisticated planes in the world uh if you don't know what you're shooting at quite frankly so they're going to have
to explain what we're going to do to try to recreate that either with in pockets of resistance inside afghanistan or the neighboring country it's going to be very complicated they have to figure out a way to do it the most effectively i just hope it's effective enough to prevent which we know is going to happen terrorist groups are already there and their whole purpose for existing is to attack the west and they're going to trade mick and jericho let's see if we get our questions answered they h
ave begun let's listen in we'll talk on the flip side
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