Chris Wallace Grills Biden NatSec Adviser on Afghanistan Withdrawal: ‘Can You Guarantee’ This Won’t Be a Repeat of What Happened in Iraq?
Fox News’ Chris Wallace put White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on the hot seat over President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan later this year.
On Fox News Sunday, Wallace noted that Biden’s withdrawal plan prompted national security concerns over the possibility that it could lead to a terrorism resurgence. This led Wallace to ask “why did the president overrule the Pentagon?” and what would happen to the women of Afghanistan if the Taliban re-establishes national dominance.
“With respect to the terrorist threat from Afghanistan, President Biden is not going to take his eye off the ball,” Sullivan answered. “He said in his speech that we would maintain capabilities in the region to be able to deal with any threat that reconstitutes and our intelligence community made clear this week in public testimony that we will have months of warning before al Qaeda or ISIS could have an external plotting capability from Afghanistan. So we are not going to take our eye off the ball.”
Sullivan went on by stressing Biden’s interest in protecting the human rights of Afghan citizens, plus the president’s determination that the country’s security forces are now prepared to defend their own people. Wallace countered, however, by airing a speech Biden gave in 2011 urging a pullout of U.S. troops in Iraq.
“You know what happened as well as I do,” Wallace said. “ISIS grew, ended up seizing 40 percent of the territory in Iraq, and the U.S. ended up having to send back 5,000 troops because they left too early. Can you guarantee that won’t happen in Afghanistan?”
Sullivan responded:
I can tell you that President Biden has no intention of sending forces back to Afghanistan but at the same time, he has no intention of taking our eye off the ball. We have the capacity from repositioning our capabilities over the horizon to continue to suppress the terrorist threat in Afghanistan. I can’t make any guarantees about what will happen inside the country. No one can. All the United States could do is provide the Afghan security forces, the Afghan government, and the Afghan people resources and capabilities, training and equipping their forces, providing assistance to their government. We have done that and now it is time for American troops to come home and the Afghan people to step up to defend their own country.
Watch above, via Fox News Sunday.
