By leaving American forces in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden could have prevented the fall of the country’s capital city to the Taliban terrorist organization this weekend, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney said during a television appearance Monday morning.
Cheney appeared on CBS This Morning to discuss the situation in Kabul, Afghanistan, which was overtaken by the Taliban this weekend almost 20 years after U.S. troops drove the organization out in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on America.
She blamed both former President Donald Trump and Biden for moves they made that led to the Taliban resurgence.
“In the Trump Administration the agreement that was negotiated…was a surrender agreement. It was a document that had a date certain for our withdrawal. It guaranteed, committed to prisoner releases, and…the American people were told that the Taliban was going to renounce al Qaeda. Of course, that didn’t happen,” Cheney said. “So, we had delegitimatized the Afghan government, negotiated with the Taliban, a terrorist organization, signed an agreement with them. We never should have done that, but President Biden never should have withdrawn forces.”
She added that the world is now seeing what happens when America adopts a policy of surrender, which makes the nation less safe and causes the War on Terror to be prolonged.
“We’ve really entered a very dangerous new phase now in the War on Terror, created an additional security situation and danger that we simply didn’t need to create,” she said.
Cheney did not directly answer a question about whether she believes America needs a permanent presence in Afghanistan. However, she did say officials need to determine whether America’s national security requires that military forces work with the Afghans to prevent the creation of safe havens for terrorists.
“All of the men and the women who have been deployed to Afghanistan over the last 20 years helped ensure that we didn’t have any further mass casualty attacks from Afghan territory. They helped to keep us safe. They helped to prevent the kind of attack we saw on 9/11,” Cheney said.
“So, their service was really crucially important for our security,” she continued. “I also think we need to go forward committing ourselves that we’re going to conduct ourselves in a way that is worthy of their sacrifices, conduct ourselves in a way that’s above politics, that looks at what the security requirements of the nation are, and we need to have a very serious look now at how we’re going to, in fact, conducts counterterrorism operations around the world given the heightened threat because of this complete withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
