Ben Sasse On SECDEF Austin Saying U.S. Lacks ‘Capability’ in Kabul to Create Safe Passage for Americans, Afghans to Leave: “Not True”
Senator Sasse (R-NE) sounds off on the Biden Administration & President Biden himself over the reckless withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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Full Transcript:
GUY BENSON, FOX RADIO HOST: Let’s get right to our first guest on the program. He is U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. He joins me now.
Senator, good to have you.
SEN. BEN SASSE (R-NE) Hey, Guy, thanks for the invite.
BENSON: I would like to play for you an exchange on “ABC News” last night between the anchor, George Stephanopoulos and the president of the United States, Joe Biden; addressing what is happening right now on the ground in Afghanistan. I could hardly believe my ears yesterday when we played this on the show. I still can’t quite believe it. Cut one, listen.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC NEWS ANCHOR: So, you don’t think this could have been handled – this actually could have been handled better in any way, no mistakes?
JOE BIDEN, (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No, I don’t think it could have been handled in a way that – we’re going to go back in hindsight and look, but the idea that somehow there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know how that happens.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So, for you that was always priced into the decision?
BIDEN: Yes.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
BENSON: This is the best we can do, says the president of the United States. What do you say?
SASSE: Well, it’s just shockingly disconnected from reality. Obviously, the president’s team continues to urge him to treat it like a P.R. crisis instead the ongoing nation defining security crisis it actually is. Obviously, that’s an unsustainable position. I don’t care about the politics of all this. But they’re going to regret all that for political reasons just because of how stupidly absurd it is.
But here’s what’s actually happening on the ground over there. What’s happening on the ground over there is that the French are doing gun runs to try to get their people out. The French are kicking more ass to get their people out of the country and out of harm’s way than we are —
(CROSSTALK)
BENSON: The Brits too.
SASSE: — that. The Brits and the Americans, I don’t – because I serve on the Intelligence Committee, I don’t want to cross any lines here. But the Brits are incredibly frustrated with America and for reasons that are very, very understandable. I don’t – I don’t think the American people understand the peril that Joe Biden has put us in.
This Karzai Airport has a single runway right now. That means that a single Talibani fighter with an RPG can turn this into a legitimate hostage situation by downing a plane on the tarmac.
We need to expand the perimeter right now. And you have military leaders trying to be faithful to their commander-in-chief but not fighting him nearly hard enough. The bunker silo that the White House staff has tried to put the president in and keep him from hearing the military advise that he needs right now has the military talking as if we lack the capacity to expand the perimeter.
BENSON: Well, I mean they’re saying –
(CROSSTALK)
SASSE: What we lack is the will.
BENSON: Yes, they’re saying it outright. In fact, let’s play it, cut 16. And again we’ll juxtapose what you just said about the French government, what they are doing. We won’t make you comment on what the Brits are doing. But there are reports that they are sending teams out like the French to make sure that their people are brought in safely. What about the United States? Well the Defense Secretary, yesterday, said this.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
UNKNOWN: I mean you’re still saying you’re focused on the airfield, they – these people can’t get into the airfield
LLOYD AUSTIN, U.S. DEFENSE SECRETARY: Well we’re going to do everything we can to continue to try to de-conflict (ph) and create passageways for them to get to the airfield. I don’t have the capability to go out and extend operations currently into -Kabul. And where do you take that? I mean how far can you extend into Kabul, you know, and how long does it take to flow those forces in to be able to do that?
(END AUDIO CLIP)
BENSON: He says that — this is the Defense Secretary of the United States of America, saying that we don’t have the capacity to go out and do what the French are currently doing, as you point out, Senator. That is their answer. We don’t have the capacity to do it. Which I think on its face is completely ridiculous.
SASSE: It is completely ridiculous, it’s a false statement. We need military leaders to stop acting like politicians and to tell the truth, and then let political officials who are elected be held accountable for the policy choices they make.
But to claim that we don’t have the capacity is simply not true. And the moral imperative in this moment when we’ve got thousands and thousands of Americans still well beyond the airport, well beyond the wire who can’t get there, and we have an administration, we have a State Department sending notices out to Americans in Kabul saying we can not guarantee your safety getting here. But the Taliban has said you’ll be getting free access to the airport.
Trusting the Taliban to get access to the airport is like trusting Hitler to give access to the beaches of Dunkirk. This is insane and the American military needs to be directed. They need to be given the power and the authority to either expand the perimeter around Karzai Airport right now past these — pass them through these Talibani checkpoints that are keeping people from being able to get to the airport, or what we need to retake Bagram Air Force Base.
This is one of the great wonders in all of U.S. history, that this administration directed us to abandon the airfield that was secure and that provided the support, not just for this evacuation, obviously, I’m strongly against this decision to withdraw.
But the debate we’re having here is not about the decision to withdraw; we’re talking about the just completely incompetent execution of this that has put at risk thousands and thousands of Americans and 60 to 80,000 of our Afghan allies who are not abstract people.
These are individual humans and families and moms and dads that are at the wire at the airport with children at their knees. And they came to that airport because we guaranteed their security because they fought alongside us against a common enemy.
These people are at that airport because we promised we would never just cut and run. I’m hearing from U.S. troops constantly who fought over the last 20 years in Afghanistan, and they’re saying I gave my word on behalf of the United States government and people because my commander said we would never just bail on these people — these interpreters, these drivers, these co-belligerents who fought alongside us.
They were helping us take the battle against the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Manhattan to the battlefields where these people were given a safe haven to plan these kinds of attacks.
We owe it to these people to keep our word, and right now we have a commander-in-chief who thinks he’s dealing with a couple of media cycles, and that this will just go away in two weeks.
This is about how a superpower ceases to be a superpower in the eyes of the world by having no moral coherence about what we’re doing and the pledges we’ve made.
BENSON: What is the commander-in-chief up to? I mean, I don’t want to make this too political here, but he is the commander-in-chief, he was elected talking about all of his experience in foreign policy. He’s been largely MIA in terms of answering questions. He’s taken a few questions from one journalist, that’s it. He’s run away from other questions multiple times.
When he deigns to make these brief appearances to read off of a teleprompter, then he goes back — there are reports he’s going to go back to Delaware for the long weekend. He just was on vacation or whatever he was doing in Camp David.
The administration admitted that until, what, the day before yesterday, he had not spoken to a single world leader over the course of five or six days while this was all transpiring. The British press is reporting that Boris Johnson was trying to get him on the phone for a day and a half and couldn’t. I mean, what is he doing? What is he doing?
SASSE: I can’t make sense of what is motivating the president and his core team right now. They knew the risk. Without talking about classified assessments, I can simply tell you that for months, not just Republicans, but Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have been worried about an outcome like this.
The administration officials tried to repeatedly tell us things that are at odds with a lot of intelligence assessments were getting – which, they were saying there’s no chance the Taliban mounts and offensive on Kabul before the winter. The winter will pause the fighting season, and they — and the administration talked as if the only way you’d ever have a big Taliban offensive was next spring.
And we said we don’t understand where you’re getting this idea and this certainty. But even if you believe that, what is your contingency plan? And they have — they have repeatedly told us for months that they had a contingency plan.
And what seems to be clear now is that there was some sort of insular group saying that because the president was so sure of this, because he was rejecting the advice of military commanders who wanted to leave a few thousand folks there, so we could continue to provide the air cover that was necessary for the intelligence gathering of the Special Forces operations we were doing on the ground to decapitate terror organizations –
BENSON: Well, but –
SASSE: – everyone said, well, the president’s made up his mind, so this is the future. And it appears like there were no adults in the room.
BENSON: – but there – and here’s what’s so confusing to me, Senator. Because President Biden in that interview on ABC also said that he was not being advised to keep 25 troops – 2,500 troops on the ground. Which, I know that’s been widely reported that that advice did come to him. He’s saying he doesn’t recall that. And he’s also saying, well, we planned for every contingency – they keep saying that.
They keep repeating that line, which I think is just an unbelievably damning self-own. Like, they planned for this? That is almost worse, but at the same time at – in the next breath, they say, but we didn’t foresee this unraveling this quickly, and no one did. And the intelligence didn’t show that. It sounds like you’re saying that that is false.
SASSE: Let’s distinguish between the after-action assessments that are going to be required in the future. I’ll say something brief about that, but then I want to get back to what needs to be done in this moment.
There will clearly be State Department versus State Department, defense versus defense, intelligence community versus intelligence community, NSC versus wider White House staff, politicals versus careers, as people run away from this.
Because lots of people tried to warn the administration that this politically driven, sort of mission accomplished moment of saying August 31, or pre-September 11 – the 20th anniversary, he’s going to have brought all the boys home stop (ph) was disconnected from conditions on the ground, and lots of people were telling the administration that this was a very bad idea, and many of those people were inside the administration.
Now, they were going to try to equivocate and say, well, because of the decisions that were made and the deal that had been cut with the Taliban in the last administration – and let’s be clear, I was against that deal. I was against the last administration negotiating with the Taliban.
But this is enough of Joe Biden just constantly making excuses for every bad decision his administration has made by blaming the Afghan people, many Afghan fighters who fought alongside us, the previous administration – he’ll blame everybody but the people who made the decisions and the Taliban. The Taliban seems to be the only group that he’s unwilling to criticize –
BENSON: Well, because –
(CROSSTALK)
BENSON: – we’re sort of at their mercy right now, right? He doesn’t want to wrangle (ph) them too much because this could get a lot uglier if they decide to start shooting and blowing things up with Americans in their crosshairs, which they might, right?
I mean, it’s just – it’s such a groveling, pitiful thing to watch, the president of the United States trying to avoid insulting a terrorist group that’s taken over a country based on abject incompetence that they’re now lying to cover up.
Last question, Senator, before you go. This is less important than the human beings component of this but moving into the future and terrorism – I mean, this could affect lives, of course, as well.
Reports everywhere of the Taliban seizing tens of millions – maybe hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of American weapons and equipment – airplanes, humvees, guns, drones, helicopters. I’ve heard some people sort of snarking, oh, well good luck trying to fly those things.
First of all, I don’t know what their capacity will be now or in the future. I’m also worried about the Chinese or the Russians coming in and paying them to say, hey, give us that American technology. We want to buy it from you, here’s the cash.
And now they have our technology that they can go and figure out how we operate, which becomes a national security concern unto itself. I mean, again, they say they planned for every contingency. Well, the reality on that front is highly disturbing.
SASSE: Yes, so we’ve got five major problems around the world, and on all five of them – on both the realist and idealist dimension, America is weaker now than we were two weeks ago. So, relative to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and a grab bag of Jihadis that now have a recruiting hive on the alleged graveyard of superpowers in Afghanistan.
So Jihadis, North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, on all five dimensions we are weakened objectively, and we are weakened in terms of our ability to persuade people that they want to be on the side of the United States going forward.
A great nation and surely a great nation that believes in the universal dignity of, not just all 330 million Americans, but 7.8 billion people on God’s Earth. If you believe in universal human dignity, you want to attract allies to your side because you have a vision for how when you make your commitment — you go slow before you make a commitment. But if you draw a red line, you keep your word.
And right now, all over the world, Chinese Embassies are telling people, our friends and people who are across the line, maybe a little a closer to oppositional forces, they’re saying, why would you ever recognize Taiwan, because this is how the United States treats its allies.
Our commander-in-chief needs to come out and address the American people and address the world about what his plan is to make sure we keep our word to the Americans that are still in Kabul and beyond and to our closest allies who’ve risked their safety on our behalf.
BENSON: Well he hasn’t done it. He hasn’t come close to it.
But on that very sunny note, Senator, we’ve got to let you go. We’re up on a break. We appreciate your time. We share your frustration and anger, is what I sense in your voice. But I think it’s righteous and well deserved – and I — it’s regrettable to say that.
Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, a member of the Intelligence Committee among others in the Senate. Thank you, Senator.
SASSE: Thank you, Guy. Appreciate the time.
