Keane laments for Afghanistan: al Qaeda will ‘flourish’ under Taliban leadership
'This is fundamentally a stain on the United States national honor'
Taliban leadership has allowed al Qaeda to join in on terrorizing Afghanistan and the United States will suffer the consequences, retired Gen. Jack Keane told "Kudlow" on Monday.
Keane: We're watching here, unfolding before our eyes, one of the most significant foreign policy and national security blunders in the history of the United States… This is fundamentally a stain on the United States' national honor, what has happened here. We allowed the collapse of Afghanistan. Then we conducted an ill-conceived, hasty withdrawal that set no conditions for what we're seeing today. And it is despicable. And the fact that we are contracting out to the Taliban how we're going to bring people out of the country makes no sense to me…
I have yet to hear a plan for taking out people who cannot get to Kabul because the Taliban have clogged those arteries and certainly have established checkpoints. We have the wherewithal to do that. I'm not saying it's not complicated, but this is the United States of America. And are we making a commitment to these people or not? And what I'm hearing is that the administration has really made up its mind to get out on 31 August — and that's the date certainly our troops will leave, that will shut down operations, evacuating before that – and we're going to leave thousands of people behind, hopefully no American citizens, but we're going to leave thousands of Afghan partners behind. I don't know how you live with that reality. That is something that will have consequences for years to come.
Al Qaeda is already there. ISIS has got a couple of thousand there. They will flourish under the Taliban leadership. They don't have to hide. They can bring in resources. The Taliban can give them resources, certainly not ISIS, but the al Qaeda itself. And it's going to be an epicenter for others who want to come to Afghanistan.
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