Sunday School 7/4/21: Extra Credit

As promised in this week's Sunday School, here are highlights from Mike Emanuel's interview with Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) on Fox News Sunday. McCaul is the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Emanuel was sitting for Chris Wallace.

• McCaul agrees with an op-ed in the Washington Post that "rivals such as Iran, China, and Russia" could view our withdrawal from Afghanistan that "President Biden lacks the stomach to stand up for US allies."  He noted that the Intelligence Community's assessment that the Taliban could take over all of Afghanistan in as little as six months, including Bagram Air Base, which we just turned over to the Afghans last week. 
• He criticizes "the lack of planning and preparation" for the withdrawal, and for what's likely to come. According to a meeting he had with Afghan President Ghani, this is going to be "the year of the jihad," with "all the young males in Pakistan at the madrassas are poised with the Taliban to pour over into Afghanistan and you're going to see a major civil war take place." It won't be pretty, he feels, and he's worried about our embassy and he staff there. 
• We need to work on getting visas for the around 9,000 Afghani interpreters, contractors and their families who helped us during the war, he said; "we made a promised to them... we told them we'd take care of them and we can't turn our backs and leave them to die. They will be slaughtered by the Taliban. They're targeted by the Taliban. We have to get them out of there." He said he thinks, finally, there's some attention to the issue and we may be able to move them to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan while they wait for their visas. 
• Finally, on this subject: he thinks it's political that Biden's going to get everyone out and not leave a few troops behind. "If you talk to anybody in the national security realm or in the Defense Department, you know, they -- you mentioned Secretary Austin, the head of the DOD, nobody thought this was a good idea. A residual force of 2,500 troops is not a whole lot of a footprint compared to where we have troops elsewhere to provide stability in the region." 

I will give McCaul credit for consistency, something I can't say about most Republicans, or most politicians in general. Last November, when Former Guy put forth his plan to have all troops out of Afghanistan in the spring, McCaul joined many other Rs in pushing back against that plan. Here's part of what he said.

A premature U.S. withdrawal would not only jeopardize the Afghan government’s ability to negotiate but would endanger U.S. counterterrorism interests.

Other info from yesterday's chat? 

• The coverup of the origins of COVID-19 by the Chinese Communist Party he calls "the greatest human -- greatest cover-up in human history. And you don't cover-up something if you're not trying to hide something." He wishes "the Democrats would join with us on this very important investigations and what caused this problem," not mentioning that Biden has ordered  a full investigation and a determination of whether the virus came from an animal, or from the Wuhan lab.
• He calls Biden's canceling of Trump's 'remain in Mexico' border policy "a self-inflicted wound and a foreign policy blunder," and doesn't know how they're going to fix it without going back to the Trump-era policies.
• Infrastructure is both "popular" and "bipartisan," if you're talking about roads and bridges and rural broadband, and not any of that other stuff like the Green New Deal and health care and education. And he's not excited about That Guy from Vermont using reconciliation to "basically open up to a massive tax increase. And this is a Trojan horse syndrome that I think we're most worried about."

To be sure, there are things to worry about, just as there were in the previous administration, and the one before that, and the one before that. Endless wars, immigration, and infrastructure are just a few of the things that we've been kicking down the road. 

See you around campus.