Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., on the anniversary of the Afghanistan bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops, slammed the Biden administration for its role in the deaths.
President Joe Biden on Friday issued a statement in which he recognized each of the service members who died amid the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
"I would talk about war in this way — sometimes in war there's just bad luck. I've lost friends that they, you know, they came across a machine gun nest and we didn't know it was there and somebody took a spray of a round or friends that in the dark of night they walked around a corner and there was a trip wire and nobody could see it — was near impossible to find it then we had KIA (killed in action)," Mast said Friday during an appearance on Newsmax TV's "American Agenda."
"This was not bad luck. This was a bad leader, the leader being the president of the United States of America who directly oversaw the largest operation in the history of the Afghan war, the withdrawal of all U.S. personnel. He was overseeing it, failed to plan for it, didn't want to know the risks of what could happen. … He wanted to be ignorant of the risks. Because of the bad leadership, not because of bad luck, that's why we are mourning 13 heroes."
Biden on Friday said he did not regret the handling of the withdrawal and blamed his predecessor for the war.
"The president does bear responsibility. This president would never take responsibility as we've seen," Mast said.
"President Trump had many agreements, one of those was to look at the situation on the ground and actually have a real game plan, a plan of attack, for getting out our service members, those that were carrying guns before the diplomats instead of the idiotic way that President Biden did it — getting out our equipment instead of leaving it to make the most armed terrorist force in the world — the Taliban and al-Qaida. … He conducted it because of politics, got out on the date he wanted because of politics."
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Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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