Dan Crenshaw: Joe Biden Told Americans to 'Brave Taliban Checkpoints'

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) told Breitbart News on Wednesday that the Biden administration essentially advised Americans in Afghanistan to make a dangerous journey to Kabul if they hope to receive the U.S. government’s assistance in evacuating the failed state.

President Joe Biden repeatedly told Americans wishing to leave Afghanistan to get to Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul by a deadline of August 31

“Kabul is just one city in a very large and dangerous country the size of Texas,” Crenshaw said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. “If you told everybody in Texas they had to get to Houston to get out and they had to brave checkpoints the entire time, that’s not really a great message to your fellow Americans.”

He added, “The short-term priority is getting other people out. You do that by basically saying, ‘We’re going to do it.”

Crenshaw said Americans in Afghanistan should be given alternative points of evacuations aside from an airport in Kabul.

“I also keep advocating for retaking certain air bases,” he remarked. “I think we should retake Bagram. We should retake some bases further west. … Our bases are often kind of in the middle of nowhere. They’re not like in the middle of the city the way Kabul airport is. It would be a strategic advantage to have those and just give people we want out … a different place to go.”

He continued, “It requires getting more troops in and it requires taking these airfields and then defending them for a period of time.”

Americans should be evacuated from Afghanistan prior to publicly stated deadlines of withdrawal from the country, Crenshaw held. “[U.S. forces should leave] when we’re satisfied that we’ve got everybody who should be getting out out. If anybody screws with us, we tell them we will meet them with deadly force. That should be our very simple policy.”

Crenshaw rejected the framing of the War in Afghanistan as a “so-called endless war.”

He stated, “We were actually meeting strategic objectives [in Afghanistan], but the big failure of the last 20 years was the failure of political leaders and military leaders to actually explain that to people, and I think that led to this highly emotional reaction to even one single troop [or] one single soldier out there in the belief that it means we’re in a so-called endless war.”

He went on, “It’s hard to call this a war when we haven’t lost a soldier in 18 months. Before that, an average of six deaths a year since 2014. You’re losing a hell of a lot more soldiers to accidents stateside. We were really in more of a stalemate, which was actually pretty low cost to the United States, but that actually reaped a significant benefit.”

Crenshaw noted the foreign policy “appeasement” from Biden and the Democrat Party more broadly toward America’s adversaries.

“Biden just can’t say anything bad about the Taliban,” he remarked. “It almost seems like he really is afraid of them, and he believes he has no leverage. He forgets he has the entire might the U.S. military at his disposal if the Taliban screw with us, and he just refuses to acknowledge that fact.”

He concluded, “This has been a longstanding issue with Biden. The Democrats’ foreign policy in a lot of ways, which is … is the policy of appeasement, a policy of, ‘We’ve just got to treat them like they’re our peers and be nice to them, and then we’re going to hope for the best outcome.”