A Massachusetts Democrat says he backs President Joe Biden’s decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan, but Republicans are slamming the process.
Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss led troops in Afghanistan and echoed Biden’s statements that the war could not continue forever.
“The great underarching failure of the United States’ Afghan policy was that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld allowed a tightly-scoped, military counterterrorism mission to mutate into a boondoggle of a counterinsurgency operation with no political endgame,” Auchincloss said. “That was handed off and handed off from president to president until finally Joe Biden said quite simply ‘no more.'”
But Republicans say Biden botched the execution of the withdrawal.
“You just had president Biden a few days ago saying we wouldn’t see helicopters evacuating the embassy like Saigon, and yet here we are… this is president Biden’s Saigon moment. And unfortunately it was very predictable,” said Minority Whip Steven Scalise said on Face The Nation. “It seems like many in President Biden’s intelligence community got this devastatingly wrong, and I think a lot of questions will be asked later about why just weeks ago they were saying something very different from what we’re seeing on the ground today in Afghanistan.”
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