Ben Sasse, one of the more jovial and introspective senators in America, has had enough.
Thursday on The Hugh Hewitt Show, the Nebraskan castigated the Biden administration on their world-changing blunders in Afghanistan.
“When you combine the failures morally, the failures of planning leadership, and the failures of just communication to the American people about what the actual choices are, and then end up with this many Americans, and this many heroic Afghans who fought alongside us to take the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda over there rather than over here, I don’t think there’s a parallel to this,” Sasse claimed.
Asked by Hewitt if the White House is functioning properly amid the crisis, the two-term senator replied, “It sure as heck doesn’t feel like you have a plan. And you’re saying all these romantic, weird things about the Taliban craving international recognition and legitimacy, and there will be no Taliban assault on Kabul until after the pause in the fighting season for the winter. Why are you so sure of this, and what is your contingency plan? And it’s clear that they didn’t have one.”
The host then asked Sasse if he had advice for President Biden.
“We should be unambiguous that there is absolutely no countdown clock on American lives…we are getting those people out, and we are indifferent to the calendar,” the senator, who’s been consistent in his foreign policy critiques, said. “He {Biden} should speak to the American people and the world. He obviously has the biggest bully pulpit that’s ever existed. But he needs to direct our military to push the perimeter out way beyond Karzai airport.”
Sasse also sat for an important interview with Townhall’s Guy Benson Thursday, quipping that “Trusting the Taliban to get access to the airport is like trusting Hitler to give access to the beaches of Dunkirk.”
As many lawmakers request a full transcript of Biden’s Wednesday ABC News interview, Sasse concurred, adding in part:
“We gave our support, and these people now see that we are abandoning them, an unbelievably immoral act on the global stage. And the American people see…the commander-in-chief gets irked and says that was days ago? No, these are images that are going to last 100 years. The president’s team is coaching him to treat this as if the American people have no attention span, and two weeks or two months from now will have all forgotten it.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee member concluded the 10-minute interview by noting:
“It was always a false choice to say we need to have zero troops in theater, or we need 150,000 occupying ground forces. We haven’t had 100,000 people in Afghanistan in a decade plus. What we needed was the Special Forces on the ground, the intelligence gathering capabilities, and air support,” Sasse explained. “And what went wrong here tactically, more than anything else, is the bizarre political decision of the Biden administration to just rip the air support from the Afghan security forces, and then turn around and be surprised that these people who were trained to fight in a way that had air superiority, and now the United States took their air superiority away from them, and we’re surprised that they then weren’t sure how they would fight?”
