Sen. Tom Cotton calls President Biden Afghanistan withdrawal 'disastrous,' warns of long-lasting impacts

 

Cotton made the comments during an exclusive interview with Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," where he stressed that the "chaos" in Afghanistan is "tragic" and "heartbreaking" for "so many veterans who served in Afghanistan and their Gold Star families. 

The Arkansas senator also called the president’s withdrawal "ill-conceived" and "ill-planned," noting that there are "anywhere from 10 to 15,000 Americans stranded behind Taliban lines," who cannot get to the airport.  

"In effect these Americans are hostages to the Taliban," Cotton said. 

Cotton said that yesterday Secretary of State Blinken claimed that we should just accept the reality that the Taliban are in control of Kabul. But Cotton strenuously disagrees, saying:

We don’t have to accept that. The Taliban is in control of Kabul until the United States says we are in control of Kabul. And if they want to attack our people at that airport, we have more than enough combat power in the United States military to fight back and destroy those attacks. That’s what Joe Biden should say we’re going to do until we get every single American out of Afghanistan.

He’s exactly right. There’s no way we should leave any American behind in Afghanistan, especially after Biden let the Taliban have it so easily. If it means staying in Kabul until the job is done, that’s exactly what we should do and we should dare the Taliban to come at us.

But I think we should do even more than just stay at the airport. Many countries are sending their troops into Kabul to get their people out, except the US. Biden believes in trusting the Taliban to allow safe passage, but that’s a deal with the devil that ain’t going like he’d hoped. Biden needs to send our troops out into the city to extract our people and get them to the airport safely. End of story.