Senator Floats Court-Martial of Leadership as Response to Shameful Afghanistan Retreat
Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama floated the idea of court-martialing U.S. military leadership in the wake of the Biden administration’s deadly pullout from Afghanistan.
The former head football coach of Auburn University joined “The Jeff Poor Show” on Alabama’s WAVH-FM on Tuesday to talk about the leadership failure that led to the death of American service members last week.
The botched exit from Afghanistan has also left perhaps hundreds of Americans stranded in the country, where Taliban militants are now reportedly going door-to-door in Kabul and killing U.S. allies.
Tuberville argued the U.S. could have avoided the catastrophe by not abandoning Bagram Air Base in favor of airlifting people out of the vulnerable Hamid Karzai International Airport under a strict Aug. 31 deadline that the Taliban demanded to be kept in place.
“For some reason, Joe Biden made a deal with the Taliban,” he said, noting the Taliban demanded a deadline from Biden, which he abided by.
“The United States of America does not take deadlines; we give out deadlines. We got people killed because of it. It was a disaster,” Tuberville said.
The senator lamented the deaths of American troops and Afghan allies and also hinted at coming Senate hearings to demand answers for what went wrong.
Asked by Poor about removing President Joe Biden through impeachment or the 25th Amendment, should those avenues be on the table, Tuberville had a different idea: court-martial.
“It’s all about leadership. You know that. I’ve always told you that. Being in any position where you make decisions, it’s about leadership. And it’s about listening to people. You alone can’t make that decision yourself. You have to lean on people who know a lot more about it than you,” he said in reference to Biden’s decision to leave the country in the manner in which it did.
“I know just by hearing that a lot of these generals said, ‘Let’s do not leave Bagram Airbase until we get everybody out.’ But for some reason, this president, and him alone, made the decision to come out,” he added.
On calls to remove Biden, the senator had a different idea.
“There’s going to be people hollering for 25th Amendment and impeachment. We don’t need to get in those weeds. If we go anywhere, somebody needs to be court-martialed over this, because we’ve got people killed that did not have to die,” he said.
Tuberville called the U.S. exit from Afghanistan a “retreat” and predicted the military at some point will have to return as the country will become a hotspot for terrorism.
“We’ll have to go back, mark my words, we’ll have to go back in Joe Biden’s tenure. And we will lose lives of either trying to get people out, or taking something over, or something the Taliban has done, whether it’s in London, whether it’s in New York, whether it’s in LA,” he said. “Something is going to happen because of terrorism and we’re going to have to go back.”
Tuberville concluded by arguing, “There should have been a lot more people involved in this than Joe Biden, himself, saying, ‘Hey, I got us out of this 20-year war.’”
“This wasn’t a 20-year war,” he said. “We had not been fighting for several years. We had just been training people to fight, and we’ve only had 2,500 soldiers over there — not really in harm’s way. It was just a terrible decision. It’s politics at its worst.”
Poor speculated that Biden ordered the hasty retreat so that he could enjoy the optics of claiming he had ended the war in Afghanistan in time for the upcoming 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.
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