On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain responded to former CENTCOM Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie’s (Ret.) criticism of the handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal that people should have been evacuated earlier and the events of the evacuation were set in motion when the decision to leave completely was made in April 2021 by saying that Americans aren’t going to be killed “fighting in Afghanistan” and won’t spend money on the Afghan government anymore.
Klain stated, “I have great respect for Gen. McKenzie, who commanded our troops with honor and effectiveness and led this evacuation mission. But I have to say, when President Biden took office, he made the decision to end a 20-year war. And we now, in 2022, are in the first year this century where no Americans are going to perish fighting in Afghanistan, the first year this century …when American taxpayers are not putting $300 million a day into a government that cut and ran when the fighting began in Afghanistan — when the fighting intensified in Afghanistan last year. So, I think the president’s decision to say, look, the American people sent their sons and daughters to this country for 20 years and paid with their lives, the American taxpayers invested in this army for 20 years, and it was time for that to end. It was time to bring our people home. It was time to end this war. And, by the way, the promise the president made at that time was that we would still keep our eyes on terrorism, and the mission we conducted earlier this month where we took out the emir of al-Qaeda in Kabul without a single American boot on the ground, without risk to a single American troop, that’s the model of how to fight terrorism, how to keep the American people safe.”
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