Crenshaw blasts Biden’s handling of Afghanistan as ‘so utterly incompetent’
Afghanistan collapse sparks US national security concerns.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, who served in Afghanistan and lost his right eye in an explosion, blasted President Biden’s handling of Afghanistan as "so utterly incompetent." Crenshaw specifically called out Secretary of State Antony Blinken for leading the withdrawal and overruling advice from the military.
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DAN CRENSHAW: But then there's the question of how they did this. And that's really what we need to be talking about now. How Biden did this is so utterly incompetent.
My office has been in touch with sources who are very close to the operation. And this is a State Department-led operation. The State Department overruled DOD. When DOD wanted to make Bagram the last place where we would have troops, the State Department overruled them. It was a foolish mistake because Bagram can hold a lot more aircraft, for instance, than Kabul Airport.
Their explanation was optics. They didn't like how that would look. They didn't like how that would look to invade Kabul before Bagram, I guess. And here's another thing the State Department never did. They never even built a contingency plan to take people out of the embassy. They were planning on just staying even though the conditions on the ground were getting worse and worse and worse. Capital city after capital city was just falling. By Saturday, they had no plans to leave.
And this is what we're hearing from insiders. The secretary of the state owes the American people a lot of explanations for this. Now, of course, the buck stops with Biden. Biden made all these decisions and it's absolutely reprehensible. But the State Department really botched this.
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