Rep. McCaul says Taliban blocking Americans on 6 planes from leaving Afghanistan

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Rep. McCaul on lack of US intelligence in Afghanistan: We're going back to pre-9/11

Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, discusses Americans and Afghan interpreters left behind in Afghanistan, Taliban retaliation and U.S. relations with the Taliban going forward.

Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, on Sunday blasted President Biden for the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, saying that he has "blood on his hands" for the 13 U.S. service members who were killed in the Kabul airport blast.

McCaul also asserted that the Taliban has blocked Americans aboard six planes at Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport from leaving Afghanistan while they make demands of the U.S.

"I've said all along this president has blood on his hands, and this week, this last week, we had 13 servicemen and women come home, flag draped coffins at Dover Air Base," McCaul said during his "Fox News Sunday" interview. "This problem is going to get worse, not better, and we have left them behind. That's the basic creed of the military."

"Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace asked McCaul, a ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, asked how many Americans have gotten out of Afghanistan since the withdrawal deadline on Aug. 31, prompting McCaul to say, "I understand, zero."

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McCaul later talked about the mass killings of former Afghan government officials and former Afghan defense forces, saying the retaliation against those who have helped US military has been "severe."

"The retaliation has been severe, Chris. You have stories of interpreters being taken home to their families and watching their wives and families being beheaded, executed before they execute the interpreter," McCaul said. "This is not a new and improved Taliban. This is the same old Taliban. They are reverting back to with the same brutal practices."

The Texas Republican went on to blast the Biden Administration for stranding over 250 Afghan orphan girls at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, saying the "U.S. government would not open the gate to let them in."

"Now they've returned and now they are under Taliban enslavement and we know that they marry off young women as young as 12, many times 14 years old," McCaul said. "It's a very sick culture and they treat women like property. I worry about the women left behind as well."

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Wallace later asked McCaul whether the United States can find a way to work with the Taliban, leading McCaul to slam the Biden administration for putting Americans and Afghan interpreters in a "precarious, dangerous situation" where Taliban is "dictating terms to us."

"Now we are left to this very desperate situation, a very bad foreign policy of having to negotiate with the Taliban, which I was always skeptical of having to do and yeah we do have frozen assets," McCaul said. "That's the only leverage we have left, because we have no military on the ground and we have no intelligence capability on the ground."