Afghanistan

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, later this week, President Biden will meet with leaders of the Afghanistan civilian democratic government. It doesn't take an administrative leak to know what will be on the agenda.

President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah Abdullah will arrive in Washington as a grave situation in their country rapidly deteriorates.

The strategic and moral consequences of President Biden's decision to abandon Afghanistan are already coming painfully into focus. Without air cover and with reduced support from the U.S.-led coalition, our Afghan partners are struggling to hold back the Taliban onslaught.

In just the 2 months since the President's announcement, extremist militants have retaken control of at least 30--30--of Afghanistan's administrative districts. Reports from the ground indicate that their heavy-handed, medieval rule is already creating new nightmares, especially for Afghan women and girls. And just last week, more than 20 of the elite, U.S.-trained special forces, who represent the country's best hope of resistance, were literally slaughtered in a Taliban raid. So it is getting harder and harder to believe that ``over-the-horizon'' support will be enough to help our Afghan partners sustain the fight against these terrorist threats. It is already clear it would intensify challenges to our own national security.

This spring, the intelligence community warned that the Taliban was ``likely to make gains on the battlefield.'' As the Director of the CIA put it, ``ability to collect and act on threats will diminish.'' Now senior defense officials are portraying follow-on threats like the resurgence of al-Qaida as not a matter of if but when.

Last week, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs acknowledged that al-Qaida still seeks to directly threaten the United States and that it could have the necessary capabilities to do so in 2 years--or even less in the case of a Taliban victory in Kabul.

They want to know how we plan to support their defensive campaign without the air support that literally saves soldiers' lives. They want to know how we plan to contribute to urgent counterterrorism missions without a robust system for collecting intelligence on the ground. And if President Biden is unwilling to reverse course, they want to know who will help protect their fellow citizens forced to flee by the Taliban's conquest.

The State Department is not prepared to efficiently process visa claims from the many Afghans who have worked closely with our personnel, let alone the massive flows of refugees already on the move. Where are the friends of America to turn? Where will they turn?

It is time for President Biden to acknowledge the consequences of his decision: that a refugee crisis in Afghanistan will mean senseless suffering; that the collapse of the Afghan state will mean a security and economic crisis across the region, a crisis America and its partners will simply be unable to ignore; that the fallout of our retreat will draw attention and resources away from even greater strategic threats from Russia and China; and that every bit of it would have been avoidable, totally avoidable.

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