“This was just not well executed, not well-planned, and that’s the failure. Leon Panetta, who’s certainly not a rabid Republican like myself, he called this yesterday, ‘The President’s Bay of Pigs.'”
On NewsTalk 1370 WCOA, I interviewed Dan McFaul of Ballard Partners, who served as chief of staff for Congressmen Joe Scarborough and Jeff Miller. McFaul also served on President Donald Trump’s transition team.
We discussed the extraordinarily swift fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Jeff Miller was the first congressman sworn into office after the 9/11 attacks.
“I was heartbroken like most Americans when I saw those images yesterday of Afghani nationals holding onto the wings of a jet cargo plane, a C-17 and plunging to their death.” said McFaul. “And it eerily brought back the images of 9/11 of those plunging to their deaths from the World Trade Center.”
He sees the sudden takeover of Afghanistan as a political failure.
“The chief of staff should have told the President, ‘Hey, this is a bad idea, Mr. President. This is not the way we need to do this.’ It was a political failure there,” he said.
“Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor failed the President. He’s a smart guy. He’s got an IQ over 200, but doesn’t have the real world experience, in my opinion, to be making these types of recommendations to the president, as was shown over the weekend.”
McFaul continued, “And it was a tone deaf response — the lag in response from the White House, the President being at Camp David, the out of office message on the press secretaries’ email. It was very tone deaf, and it was clear the President’s disaster security advisors were not prepared for what was about to happen.”
He believes the Biden Administration erred in doing the troop withdrawal in the summer.
“In Afghanistan, they call that the fighting season,” said McFaul. “Winter time, that’s the top of the world out there, some of those mountain ranges, much higher than the Rockies in America. It is ice cold out there; it is not the time to fight. Our American warfighters, men and women, we rule the winter and we rule the night, and that’s when the evacuation should have been done. We should have waited until January or February when it’s not the fighting season, it should have been done in the dead of night.”
He added, “Again, this was just not well executed, not well-planned, and that’s the failure. Leon Panetta, who’s certainly not a rabid Republican like myself, he called this yesterday, ‘The President’s Bay of Pigs.'”
