CNN "CNN Newsroom" - Transcript: Interview with Gerry Connolly

Interview

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ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Secretary of State Antony Blinken facing tough questions from lawmakers over the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan.

Republicans and Democrats are expected to grill him on what is being done to get remaining Americans and Afghans out of the country.

And joining me now is Democratic Congressman Gerry Connolly of Virginia, a member of the House committee.

You will be questioning Secretary Blinken today. What is your number- one priority?

REP. GERRY CONNOLLY (D-VA): I guess I have two, Ana. One is I'd like to hear his take on, how did we get to this place?

It didn't happen overnight. It didn't happen in late August. This was 20 years of policies gone bad that led to the fall of Kabul and the kind of evacuation crisis that we experienced.

And then secondly, I'd like to hear him engage in some self-reflection and self-criticism about how the administration could have, should have, done better in the evacuation understanding that.

You know, when you end a war, it is always chaotic. And I want to give them some credit for removing 120,000 people in the evacuation. But there are still tens of thousands left behind, and I want to know their status and what the plans are to try to help them.

CABRERA: You sent a letter in fact just last week to the secretary seeking answers, including how many Americans remain there in Afghanistan, what steps the U.S. government is taking to continue those evacuations for Americans and Afghan allies.

Have you gotten a response already, and do you know how many Americans are left?

CONNOLLY: I don't and I didn't. And I intend to pursue that today as well. As you may know, Ana, my office, I think, is the number one out of 435

congressional offices in America that submitted the most names of Afghan nationals seeking to be evacuated, 20,000 names in three weeks, and in addition to Americans or people with American residence, legal residence, who wanted to get out. And we still need a comprehensive answer.

CABRERA: When you're talking about self-reflection that you're hoping to see today, we reported at CNN recently that Secretary Blinken was sent a memo by some U.S. diplomats in July warning that the situation in Afghanistan could rapidly deteriorate and they feared a catastrophe.

Some Republicans on your committee have called for Blinken to resign. Do you think he dropped the ball?

CONNOLLY: I think he relied on intelligence and military conventional wisdom that was flat out wrong.

I mean, we had a hearing with ambassador who's a holdover from the Trump administration who led the U.S. side of the negotiations in Doha, back in 2018, who absolutely got it wrong.

I mean, in May, I point-blank asked him in questioning in the hearing, aren't we at risk of collapse in Afghanistan once we withdraw, and he flat-out said I don't think that at all, there's no reason to believe that Afghanistan could collapse.

CABRERA: So do you have confidence in the intel community then?

CONNOLLY: I think there has to be a thorough examination of what went wrong, what we relied on, what we got right. And to the extent possible to hold those who got it really wrong accountable.

CABRERA: Speaking of then, you know what comes next and whether the intel community is up for the task at hand, the Taliban police chief just said this weekend, quote, "There's no difference between the law 20 years ago or now."

With that kind of rhetoric, are you confident the U.S. will be able to keep tabs on what's happening and has a concrete counterterrorism plan for Afghanistan in the region?

[13:34:59]

CONNOLLY: Am I confident? No, I am not. I believe that with the Taliban takeover complete now, including the valley in Afghanistan, I think sources of intelligence are going dry up.

I think people are going to put themselves at enormous personal risk to cooperate clandestinely with the United States or its Western allies.

I think the country is probably going to be sealed up for a period of time.

And sadly and predictably, I think the Taliban is going to revert to the policies that it pursued 20 years ago.

CABRERA: You have been working so hard to get Afghan allies out of there. As of last week, about 60,000 people had arrived in the as part of evacuations in Afghanistan.

Can the vetting process keep up with the demand? And do you worry about anything slipping through the cracks?

CONNOLLY: There's always a risk of something slipping through the cracks.

Overwhelmingly, these people are in need. They're in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, they're families who want to stay together and want to be resettled.

There's a lot of trauma having left there under the circumstances.

So and I went out to Dulles Airport where we processed as of a week ago, 30,000 of those 60,000 and to the Dulles Expo Center where they are being sort of documented and assigned a transit position before our nonprofit community can resettle them permanently in the United States.

But I'm pretty confident that the vetting that's being done is the best we can do under these circumstances where a lot of people had to flee the country without any paperwork or documentation!

CABRERA: Congressman, thank you for being with us.

CONNOLLY: Thank you.

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