Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said President Joe Biden should send U.S. troops into Afghanistan to rescue Americans and Afghan allies as the Taliban reasserts total control over the war-torn country.
Speaking in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, on Monday, McConnell said he had learned that as many as 7,000 U.S. troops were about to be in the country to assist with the rapidly deteriorating situation in Kabul. Scenes from the city’s airport showed people clinging to the sides of a U.S. Air Force plane in their desperate attempt to escape Taliban rule.
Noting that he had predicted this outcome, McConnell plainly stated that Biden “owns it.”
“I think Afghanistan is lost. Every terrorist around the world is cheering, in Syria, in Yemen, in Africa,” he said. “They’ve watched the Taliban ... defeat America, in effect.”
When pressed about how long Americans should have stayed in Afghanistan, McConnell didn’t have as clear an answer.
“We’ve been in Germany, Japan and South Korea for over a half a century,” he said. “I don’t know the answer to that, but what I can tell you is, it was not a haven for al-Qaida. Not a single American military personnel got killed in the last year. It was a relatively benign way to keep the lid on, to avoid exactly what we’re seeing.”
In April, Biden announced the U.S. would withdraw all of its troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington that provoked the war.
McConnell repeatedly criticized the decision and for months asked Biden to reconsider. The withdrawal was faster than expected with most U.S. troops having exited the country in July. It took a mere few weeks for the Taliban to regain territory across Afghanistan.
McConnell said it would be very difficult to prevent a terrorist threat from reformulating without a local U.S. presence, especially since the Afghan army has shown little capability or desire to stand up and fight.
The Kentuckian noted he also opposed former President Donald Trump’s efforts to draw down the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. As recently as a few weeks ago, Trump claimed credit for sparking the withdrawal.
“Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think?,” Trump said at a rally. “They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to but it was very tough to stop the process. The only way they last is if we’re there. What are we going to say? We’ll stay another 21 years. Then we’ll stay for another 50. The whole thing is ridiculous.”
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