Retired U.S. Army colonel and former State Department official Ann Wright, who helped reopen the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December 2001 and later resigned in protest, says the United States should reopen its embassy now and needs to maintain a diplomatic footprint in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover. “If the United States really wants to help the people of Afghanistan … we’ve got to have a presence in Afghanistan,” says Wright.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.