HUNT: “Joining me now is NBC’s Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel from Kabul, Afghanistan. Richard, we are glad to see you safe and well after those difficult scenarios with the U.S. forces withdrawing. I mean, this is — this is happening so, so quickly.”
ENGEL: “It’s happening very quickly. The Taliban are advancing very quickly, and generally that’s the way this happens, is once you have a crack and once things start to fall apart, they fall apart very quickly. And what is happening now is the Taliban are taking over — not commando posts, the reason we were out with the commando is that is the one unit that is really still engaged in the fight. It’s the — the big army, the Afghan National Army and some of the smaller police divisions that are crumbling, and in many cases they are not putting up any kind of resistance. They are surrendering their weapons, surrendering their posts to the Taliban. The Taliban captured those weapons, captured the imagery of the surrender, put that on their propaganda channels, that intimidates other Afghan posts, so the next ones fall. They capture more weapons and it snowballs, and that’s what we’re seeing. Right now the Taliban have about a third of the Afghan military posts. So it has come down to this one unit. There are only a few tens of thousands of them, of these elite special forces that are shouldering the burden, trying to hold this country together, going on raids like that one night after night. The unit that we were with is on another mission right now. And normally, special ops don’t work that way. They’re not designed to be like a big army. They’re not designed to secure an entire country. They’re not supposed to roll from one mission straight into the next and straight into the next because the main security services here have collapsed. But that is, unfortunately, what is happening as the U.S. troops draw down. And this was — this was predictable. They knew this was coming. They knew that American forces were leaving, but once they did, the Taliban moved in and now have momentum and it is up to these relatively small, but highly trained and highly motivated forces to try to put — put a finger in the dam.”