‘We will be going back' to Afghanistan: US senator

Hawkish US Senator Lindsey Graham, who is a leading Republican voice on foreign policy matters, has predicted that the United States “will be going back into Afghanistan".

“We will be going back into Afghanistan,” Graham said in an interview on Tuesday. “We’ll have to because the threat will be so large.”

The pro-war senator said that Afghanistan will become a “cauldron” for terrorism despite assurances from Taliban leaders that they will not allow the country to become a safe haven for groups such as al-Qaeda and Daesh-K, a shadowy terrorist group that was not known to anyone before the recent deadly Kabul airport attack which killed scores of people.  

Graham predicted that the Taliban are “going to give safe haven to al-Qaeda who has ambitions to drive us out of the Mideast writ large and attack us because of our way of life.”

“We will be going back into Afghanistan as we went back into Iraq and Syria,” he added.

Graham said that US President Joe Biden’s choice is to either let the threat of terrorism fester or “hit them before they hit you.”

Biden told last month Americans that US forces will be able to keep terrorists in check without having a permanent military presence in Afghanistan.

“We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have a permanent military presence,” he said on August 16. “If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.”

Tens of thousands of US forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and removed the Taliban from power. American forces occupied the country for about two decades on the pretext of fighting against terrorists. As the US forces left Afghanistan, the Taliban stormed into Kabul, weakened by continued prolonged foreign occupation.

The Taliban are now poised to run Afghanistan again two decades after they were removed from power by American forces following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded several Islamic countries and killed hundreds of thousands of people there.

MG