POLITICUSUSA

Back in April of his year, nearly 70% of Americans agreed that it was time to pull troops from Afghanistan. There was strong b-partisan support for the measure and Donald Trump has repeatedly talked about bringing the troops home.

But now that Joe Biden has executed his plan, many Republicans seem to be getting cold feet. This was that tack taken by senate minority leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday. This led to Fox’s Chris Wallace slamming McConnell for desiring full-scale war.

Wallace noted while interview McConnell that Biden believes it would take 10,000 soldiers to secure Afghanistan. He asked, “Does President Biden have a point there? If in April, he had said, ‘Hey, the Trump deal is off. We’re staying in. In fact, we’re going to beef up the number of troops,’ he contends we’ve been back in a full-scale war with the Taliban and, unfortunately, taking a lot of casualties.”

McConnell responded:

“We haven’t lost as many as 13 people, which we lost Thursday, in any of the last four years. Our casualties since 2014 have been quite modest. Quite modest. Remember in the whole war, we have regretfully lost a couple thousand of our people,” he added. “That’s very regretful but the Afghans have lost 65,000. They have been fighting. And we’ve been in the background helping them with counterterrorism and the ongoing training of the military.”

Biden is, of course, working off Donald Trump’s plan. And if the Republican were still in office, McConnell would surely be singing a different tune.