On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) stated that if the Biden administration started evacuating people from Afghanistan earlier, “We could have gotten more folks out.” And the administration has taken sufficient accountability for the events in Afghanistan.
Host Alex Marquardt asked, “You were critical of the Biden administration during that withdrawal of August 2021. Now that you’ve seen this report, do you think that the Biden administration has taken enough accountability? They are certainly putting a lot of blame at the feet of the Trump administration.”
Crow responded, “I do. I do think the Biden administration is taking the right steps here. And listen, I pulled no punches here…there were mistakes that were made. There was a lack of coordination. The withdrawal should have happened much earlier. In fact, I actually formed the bipartisan working group in the House to actually start pushing for a withdrawal to begin in April of 2021. And had that withdrawal and that evacuation of American citizens and others started months earlier, certainly, it would have been easier. We could have gotten more folks out. All that is true, and they admitted as much in some of these reports. But what is also true is that it was absolutely the right move to pull out and end our war. It was an unwinnable war. It was untenable. The Biden administration inherited an agreement that was negotiated in the dark by the Trump administration. They started to pull down under the Trump administration. There weren’t enough troops in country to withstand the Taliban offensive that was going to come after the lapse of that deal. So, Biden’s decision was clear: He either had to push massive amounts of troops in and be in major combat operations with the Taliban again or he had to withdraw. He did the right thing by withdrawing and ending our 20-year war.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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