Gen. McKenzie: We’re Sharing Information with the Taliban to Prevent Attacks

KUBE: “General McKenzie, it’s Courtney Kube from NBC News. Can you tell us a little bit more about these extremely real additional threats from ISIS? Is it a concern about more suicide attacks? And also about some of the steps that you may be taking to mitigate future attacks. Would it include putting U.S. troops or Marines outside the gates, outside of the airport for additional perimeter security? And then, finally, with all of this, is there any discussion about sending any additional U.S. troops to Kabul airport for additional security measures?”

MCKENZIE: “Let me actually answer the last part of your question first. We assess we have the forces we need to protect ourselves there. I’m always in a constant dialogue with the Secretary. If I needed anything else, I’d be talking to him immediately. But I think we have what we need to protect ourselves. So, let’s talk a little bit about the threat streams. So, very, very real threat streams, very, very what we would call tactical. That means imminent, could occur at any moment. And they range from rocket attacks, we know that they would like to lob a rocket in there if they could. Now, we actually have pretty good protection against that. We have our anti-rocket and mortar systems, the gun systems that those of you who’ve been out there are very familiar with. They’re pretty effective against these kinds of attacks. We have them well positioned around the boundary of the airfield and we feel that we would be in good shape should that kind of attack occur. We also know they aimed a suicide vehicle-borne suicide attack in if they can, from a small vehicle to a large vehicle. They’re working all those options. And then, we’ve just seen their ability to deliver a walk-in, a vest-wearing suicide attacker. All of those things we look at. Now, the other thing we do is, we share versions of this information with the Taliban so that they can actually do some searching out there for us, and we believe that some attacks had been thwarted by them. Again, we’ve been doing this for a long — we’ve been doing this since the 14th. This is an attack that’s been carried out. We believe it’s possible that others have been thwarted. We cut down the information we give the Taliban. They don’t get the full range of information we have, but we give them enough to act in time and space to try to prevent these attacks. The other thing we’ve tried to do is we tried to push out the boundary even further so that we don’t get large crowds massing at the gate. Clearly at Abbey Gate today we had a larger crowd there than we would like, which goes to show you that the system is not perfect. But we have gained large elements of standoff at other gates, and we want to keep that kind of standoff in place. As you know, standoff for attacks like this is always the best defense. Unfortunately, we just don’t have the opportunity given the geography of the ground that we’re on to always gain that kind of standoff. Let me close up your question by saying we take the threat of these attacks very seriously. We’re working them very hard. We’re doing a variety of things. As you know, we have AH-64 attack helicopters on the ground that we’re flying to take a look. They have very good thermal and optical imaging systems. We got aircraft overhead that also have very good imaging systems. We have unmanned aircraft MQ-9s that have the ability to look. All of these systems are being applied in defense of the airfield, all on a continual basis, all of them vectored by the intelligence that we receive, and that we also use the Taliban as a tool to protect us as much as possible.”