Rand Paul: Instead of Blowing up Equipment So Taliban Didn’t Get It, We Got Strike to Make U.S. Look Less Bad that may Have Killed Civilian

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reacted to a New York Times report that the American drone strike that was supposed to target ISIS-K actually killed an aid worker by stating we could have and should have blown up American military equipment left behind in Afghanistan instead of letting it fall into Taliban hands, but instead we got “an isolated attack somewhere, which may or may not have killed its intended target” “to show that we aren’t as feckless as it looked liked we were in the withdrawal.”

Paul said, “If it[‘s] true, it’s another sad instance of just the most incompetent withdrawal we’ve ever seen in our history. But yeah, we’ll await the facts as they come forward. But yes, I’m not surprised that we are — we saw a bombing that was done to show that we aren’t as feckless as it looked liked we were in the withdrawal. And in the end, that they may have made a mistake in it, that will be one more disastrous fact after another.”

He added, “The one thing that we did know and we did have eyes on that we could have blown up were all of the helicopters we left, all of the planes we left, all of the humvees…there were a lot of things that could’ve been blown up on the way out, even if you hadn’t predicted the Taliban was going to take over, certainly, that equipment should have been destroyed on the way out. Instead, an isolated attack somewhere, which may or may not have killed its intended target. But this has been a long-standing problem with some of the drone attacks is, it may even sometimes get their target, but if they get ten or 15 innocent people in the same neighborhood as the target, it ends up creating antipathy that really may, in the end, be worse than the initial strike.”

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