We thought the Afghanistan trip by Congressmen Seth Moulton (D-MA) & Peter Meijer (R-MI) was selfish. Their objective view on the exit makes the trip well worth it.
Afghanistan trip worth it after all.
Many believed the trip by the two Congressmen from the different Democratic and Republic parties was ill-advised. Given the misinformation about the August 31st exit from Afghanistan, their trip turned out to be very important. Why? They provided an objective assertion of the necessity of a quick exit instead of a prolonged quest to evacuate every person using our military.
Congressman Seth Moulton is Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corp. He led one of the first platoons in Baghdad in 2003. Congressman Peter Meijer was an Army Reserve Officer who was deployed to Iraq in 2010. Many likely expected them to come back with an attack on the administration for evacuating quickly.
These Congressmen did not come to some adulation of the president. But they completely agreed with getting out of Afghanistan fast. They understand that the risk was too high and would not bear symmetric fruit. There was no good payoff to get more Americans and Afghan friends out with a large military presence.
One of the Congressmen told an inconvenient truth. When asked if the Afghanistan war was worth it, he was blunt.
“I think it’s impossible to sit here today and say yes,” Meijer said. “Knowing what we know, knowing what we saw, I mean we’ve seen some of the best of the American people, especially in the last two weeks — some of the best of our troops on the ground and the heroic way they’re carrying out this mission. — But we’ve also seen some of the worst of American leadership and if you draw this over the past two decades at any one year you could say what is our mission there. And you’d get a different answer from the other 19. I mean, we should have never — there needs to be unsparing accountability. We should have never put our American men and women in this position. And we need to realign our strategic and operational priorities to ensure that it never happens again. This is a failure upon failure.”
It is hard not to agree with most of that!