Rep. Crenshaw (R-TX) On Afghanistan: White House Will be Waiting A Long Time For That Applause …They Can Go To Hell

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Guy Benson: Joining us now is Congressman Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas. He’s a former Navy SEAL. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was wounded and lost his eye in Afghanistan in 2012. Congressman, it is good to have you back on the show.

Rep. Crenshaw: It’s great to be with you Guy

Guy Benson: Before I get into Afghanistan and policy and politics, you were very public in recent months about a sort of a scary situation involving your vision of your remaining eye. How are you?

Rep. Crenshaw: I’m good. I’m back to my normal, my normal is very complicated, but it’s a fine place to be and I’m pretty lucky.

Guy Benson: OK, I’m glad to hear that because I know a lot of people were pulling for you and praying for you. Let’s talk about Afghanistan and what’s happening. My intention coming into the show is to ask you about the president’s speech yesterday at some length. But that’s almost been preempted now by the most recent series of comments coming from the White House. The national security adviser briefed the press earlier from the West Wing. The president is back on vacation. It seems Jake Sullivan, among other things, said this in vut 25. I want to get your reaction.

Sullivan SOT: What you can do is plan for all contingencies. We did that. The American forces now on the ground at HQ are there because of contingency planning and drilling. We did over the course of months.

Guy Benson: And then in cut 26, he was asked a pretty straightforward question about the U.S. government’s commitment to getting Americans, all Americans, out of Afghanistan. And it was a noncommittal response. Listen

SOT: And there are Americans and Afghan allies who remain there. Will U.S. troops stay until everyone is out for a while? Maybe. So I’m not going to comment on hypotheticals, but I’m going to do is stay focused on the task at hand, which is getting as many people out as rapidly as possible. And we will take that day by day.

Guy Benson: taking it day by day, not responding to hypotheticals and saying every contingency was planned for. That is the line from the White House. Congressman, your reaction?

Rep. Crenshaw: Well, first of all, it’s not a hypothetical. That’s just the situation. Right. And so it’s not a hypothetical. Guys, you have to answer that question. You know, the irony of all this is we’ve doubled our troop presence. Like the whole point was bring the troops home. Right. That makes us feel good. Nice slogan works really well on a bumper sticker. In reality, this is always going to happen when we did that. And I want everybody to know that. And we have to ask ourselves a very simple question. Do you like this outcome better than what we had even just a few weeks ago? A very small presence. No combat casualties in 18 months. Does that sound like an endless war or does it sound like a security contingent? Does it sound like a residual force that is partnering with our Afghan partners and preventing a terrorist safe haven from occurring at a pretty low cost? You know, I’m still blown away by how we’ve come to think about what we’re what our actions are there and these contingency plans, if these guys want a round of applause because they had a QRF on standby, quick reaction force, well, they’re going to be waiting a long time for that applause. I mean, they can go to hell. They have they have screwed this up so badly. They screwed this up so badly. There’s a lot of ways they could have improved that by just having a plan for those contractors and Afghan interpreters that I’ve been talking about for months. And that’s a bipartisan concern that’s been going on for months. And they dragged their feet on that. You know, but but as it turns out, it’s much worse than that. They didn’t have a plan for them. They didn’t have a plan for U.S. citizens. They didn’t have a plan for our embassy. The U.S. ambassador was actually requesting to be flown out before all of his embassy staff were were evacuated. I don’t think a lot of people know that the State Department has has screwed that up. So just to the degree that it’s unfathomable.

Guy Benson: Well, except and Congressman, we played the sound bites yesterday. It was just a few weeks ago that the President and the Secretary of State were saying, no, this is not going to happen. The Taliban is not going to take this country over. If it does happen, it’s going to be very gradual. It wouldn’t happen over the course of a weekend. The likelihood of that takeover is extremely low. Blinken was saying, we’re going to have our embassy, we’re going to have our diplomats. They’re going to have a robust presence. That was just a few weeks ago. And now they are with a straight face, expecting us to believe. Oh, yes, they they had a contingency plan for all of this. And we’re just, you know, in the process of, I guess, watching them carry out those contingencies with e-mails we read from an email that CBS News reported that is being sent to U.S. citizens stuck in Afghanistan saying thank you for registering to be evacuated. Please try to get to the airport. We can’t guarantee your safety. That is what they’re telling American citizens. But they’re telling us from the press conference, you know, from from the podium, we have all these contingencies planned for it. It makes no sense. It’s insulting.

Rep. Crenshaw: No, they have they have no contingencies whatsoever. You bring up a good point about the about their denial of the intel that they had and that you’re seeing more and more reports coming out from the intelligence community that Biden and his advisers were told what would happen, that Taliban would take over. And I think I think the agreed upon estimates were between two months and six months. And in between, you know, two days was the actual answer. But in any case, it was obvious what would happen. It was obvious what your actions would cause. And the fact that there’s no adults in the room, the fact that these people thought that that outcome would somehow be superior to the previous status quo is absolutely insane. And I’ve been saying this over and over again. We were captured, our foreign policy was captured by emotional slogans of bring the troops home. We’ve got to stop. You know that this derives from a sense of wishful thinking that the people who people who have been advocating for that they want to live in a reality that doesn’t exist.

Guy Benson: And that’s both parties, by the way, .

Rep. Crenshaw: 100 percent, And they want to live in a reality that doesn’t exist where you can have your cake and eat it, too, where you can have zero troop presence, but also have security and peace of mind and a denial of a terrorist safe haven. They’ll even make silly things up like, well, we’ll just do these sort of long term or long range missions and surgical inserts, you know, to keep them at bay. I’m sorry. That’s not how the military works. It’s impossible, especially in a landlocked country. You need to be forward deployed. And we had a minimal force there. Now, as Americans, we again, both parties did this. Everybody equated nation building with a residual security force. And these two things are not the same. I think I think most Americans agree that nation building in a place like Afghanistan is is a waste of blood and treasure. But we did find a balance in the last few years in equilibrium that both kept Americans safe at home, get terrorism at bay, and didn’t cost us a whole lot.

Guy Benson: Well, and you said that there were and just to highlight something that you said, you said there have been no U.S. combat casualties in Afghanistan the last year and a half, which I think is probably surprising to a lot of Americans who hear the phrase like forever war and assume that we have tens of thousands of men and women over there, significant numbers of whom are dying on a regular basis. That was horrifically the case for a long time. But more recently, that equilibrium that you described was preventing that, but also preventing a terrorist organization from taking over the country. And now there’s all this jihadist chatter about using Afghanistan as a base for terrorism. Again, it’s like we’ve seen this movie before, Congressman, and it ended horrifically for the United States of America. One piece of this I want to ask you about, because there’s the question of whether or not we should have withdrawn completely. And there are different sides of that debate. A lot of Americans are on the yes side of that. You were more on the no side of that for the reasons that you’ve just laid out. Then there’s the issue of how to withdraw once the decision has been made. This is where I don’t think you can possibly deny the abject failure of the Biden administration. It’s just been stunning. It’s been stunning to watch. And one element of it that I have never understood, not that I’m an expert on these matters at all, but it was last month that we handed off Bagram Air Base to a military that clearly collapsed when they didn’t have some of the support that we had been giving them for a long time. It seems like a single airport in a single runway is becoming this huge focal point, as we are desperately in a panicked way trying to get people out of the country, among many other things that could have been done differently. Why the hell wouldn’t you maintain an air base for the purpose of evacuation if it came to that, if you were indeed, you know, operating with all these contingency plans in place? Instead, they just turned the keys over in the dead of night last month.

Rep. Crenshaw: Yeah, there’s a lot of unpack there, I mean, the reason why fundamentally is because they were relying on bumper sticker slogans for their policy. You know, you can’t fit in well we’re still going to have an air base and all the personnel associated with it. You can’t fit that into the you bring the troops home, Slogan. And that’s how they think they’re thinking and emotional sloganeering terms, you know. By the way, when you ask most Americans the more nuanced question on this, should we keep a residual security force, you know, just in case, then you start getting a majority saying, yes, that’s American future, a more nuanced approach and realize that it’s not so black and white as bringing the troops home or or endless wars and nation building. There’s a lot in between that. There’s a lot of complexities of this that I think our leaders for for two decades now have completely failed to communicate this to the American people on both sides. It’s been very frustrating to watch.

Guy Benson: Congressman, on MSNBC yesterday, there was a panel and unsurprisingly, you had a lot of people gushing over the president’s speech, which I thought was actually a pretty disgraceful speech for reasons that I’ve written about today at Townhall.com. Nicolle Wallace, one of their news anchors, I guess, if you can call her that, said that 95 percent of Americans would agree with the speech. One of the guests that they brought on later in the programing was a guy named Matt Zeller from a group called No One Left Behind. He’s also an Army veteran. And to their credit, they had him on. And Brian Williams asked him a question. He responded to it. Cut 17. I want to get your response to this,.

SOT: But I’m curious to hear your reaction of this consequential speech by the American president. Didn’t run from it. He owned it. He owned his decision. He owned the fact that, as he put it, the buck stops with him. I hope he gets to own their deaths, too. I don’t know. I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled. There is such a profound boldface lie in that speech. The idea that we planned for every contingency we sent them plan after plan and how to evacuate these people. Nobody listened to us. They didn’t plan for the evacuation of our Afghan wartime allies. They’re trying to conduct it now at the eleventh hour, the thing that they were most concerned about was the optics of a chaotic evacuation.

Guy Benson: Congressman, you can hear the passion in his voice and they’re sort of trying to pretend and these are not arguments that can stand at the same time, they’re trying to pretend that they had this thing planned and had all these contingency plans in place, but also didn’t see this coming. And it happened much more quickly than they were expecting. Those are sort of mutually exclusive things, but they’re kind of grasping on to anything they can right now at the White House.

Rep. Crenshaw: Yeah, the blame game they’re engaging in is is disgraceful. I watched that clip went pretty viral on the Internet and for good reason. And he’s exactly right. I mean, I don’t know how you can interpret Biden’s actions as anything but disgraceful. And in blaming the the Afghan army, that’s particularly disgraceful. They sacrificed, tens of thousands of troops. And we’ve lost about one hundred troops in the last five years. They’ve lost tens of thousands. And nobody nobody remembers that, and they also what they rely on are logistics, they rely on our air power. There are 20 year old country and this notion that they’re supposed to be this dominating force that can deal with something like the Taliban, which hides among civilians and plays by no rules whatsoever. It’s an absurd notion, you know, and they need some sense of morality. And when we say we’re leaving over and over and over again for years, we’ve been saying, you know, because, hey, no more endless wars. Well, what does that do? It it removes morale from our Afghan partners and delivers morale to the Taliban, the Taliban, all that. Now they know because we’ve told them that all they have to do is wait it out. And it’s newsflash to our policymakers. I don’t know why we keep making this mistake. You don’t have to tell them. You don’t have to set deadlines. By the way, if you do send them, I do not insult the American people by making it. On September 11th, I was another just disgusting cell phone by the by the by the administration. I really cannot believe they did that. I can’t believe anybody advised them to do that. Probably the same people who advise them to do that ridiculous video in the White House with that tic tok influencer. But, you know, that’s neither here nor there. It’s the same point was just

Guy Benson: a few days ago in place that maybe he was running the show while they were contingency planning for Afghanistan. Perhaps that was what was happening. I want to ask the last question here before we let you go, Congressman. We have seen some voices on the right, including some folks that we often agree with, saying maybe we shouldn’t bring the people in Afghanistan who helped us and risked their lives to help us for many years. Maybe we shouldn’t bring them back to the United States because of demographics issues. And this isn’t a form of immigration invasion. We’ve seen this argument now being made from some pretty significant platforms. What is your what is your reaction when you hear that type of argument sort of turning this into an immigration issue? And what do you make of those who say on this issue, at least we don’t owe it to these people to bring them to the United States?

Rep. Crenshaw: Yeah, I’m not sure who they’re talking about a different categories of people, are we talking about every civilian that wants to come? Because that might be what they’re responding to if they’re just talking about the applications. The thing that I’ve been beating the drum on for a couple of months now know our interpreters are contractors, people who we made promises to who are at risk from from helping us. You know, we absolutely need to to help them get there and they help them get through the process. I mean, before all this disaster took place, the conversation was about getting them to a third country quickly so that we could do the processing there and their families wouldn’t be hunted down and killed. I mean, these interpreters are extremely brave people. I mean, the guy who died in front of me as I got blown up was an interpreter. And just to say that these these people don’t deserve to be in America is insane and heartless. And let’s just be honest. A lot of people out on our side that have no understanding of why we were there, what’s going on, anything about it. They make emotional arguments just like Biden does. But let’s just be perfectly honest about that. It’s been a problem on both sides. And it’s because our leadership never communicated clearly what this is all about to the American people. I’ve been trying to do that for years now. There’s division on the right with this conversation. And I mean and this is how I get this is where it gets us, where it gets us that kind of wishful thinking.

Guy Benson: Well, I can hear the frustration in your voice, and I think a lot of people are disgusted and frustrated watching what we’re watching. Congressman Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas. His book is Fortitude. He is a former Navy SEAL who. Spilled his blood in Afghanistan and he’s now watching what’s happening. And Congressman, we appreciate your time and your your insight and your perspective here, because people need to hear it. Thanks for joining us.

Rep. Crenshaw: Great to be with you Guy.

Guy Benson: Congressman Crenshaw on the Guy Benson Show.