August 26, 2021 by Emma Colton and Houston Keene
Republicans are slamming the Biden administration’s handling of Afghanistan after a suicide bombing outside the Kabul airport killed at least 10 U.S. service members and wounded dozens more.
“Mr. President, fix the mess you created. Stop running from it. We are still at war. You didn’t ‘end the war,’ you just gave the enemy new advantage. Go on offense, establish superiority, and don’t leave until all our citizens and allies are safe,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw tweeted in response to the violence.
A second explosion was also reported near the Baron hotel near the airport.
The violence sparked others to join Crenshaw in criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of Afghanistan and sending their prayers to U.S. troops on the ground.
Rep. Scott Franklin, R-Fla., — a former Naval aviator — told Fox News in a Thursday interview that he was “not surprised” by the attack.
“I’m not surprised. It’s hard to watch but I’m not surprised,” Franklin said. “I mean ISIS-K, they’re all intertwined, all interrelated, they feed off of one another. Not at all a surprise to me.”
Franklin said he wasn’t sure what could be done to help Americans get out amid the chaos and if suicide bombings would be a reoccurrence, calling the situation on the ground in Afghanistan “a damn mess.”
“I don’t know, it’s just a damn mess… We put ourselves at the mercy of an enemy that we fought for 20 years and at a point we had under control, we relinquished any upper hand we had against them.”
Critics previously slammed Biden this week for not extending the Aug. 31 deadline of withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, with Republican Rep. Michael McCaul saying the president would “have blood on his hands.”
“I can tell you there’s no way we can humanly get all of our American citizens and Afghan partners out of country by that time. I’ve called this consistently an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions. It will be a stain on this presidency, and particularly of the decision made today, and what we heard today. He will have blood on his hands, people are gonna die,” McCaul said during a press briefing on Tuesday afternoon.
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