Afghanistan

Floor Speech

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Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I join the Senator from Missouri and his colleague, Senator Blunt, expressing my condolences and concern for the family of Lance Corporal Jared Schmitz from the great State of Missouri and others who died at the Kabul airport in the effort to free Americans and Afghans who helped Americans from their country and from their deaths.

It takes us back to this weekend, Saturday, September 11. Our Nation remembered the horrific attacks that occurred 20 years previous and reflected upon the fight against terrorism, which was set in motion on that very fateful day.

The events that unfolded in Afghanistan these past few weeks have made the 20th anniversary of September 11 that much more painful; painful especially for the men and women who served our Nation in Afghanistan.

The chaos and collapse of that country cost American lives, opened old wounds, and left many Americans questioning how all this could happen in this manner.

The American people require answers from the administration on how our withdrawal from Afghanistan went so horribly--so horribly, horribly wrong. Officials should be, must be, held accountable for their weak leadership and mismanaged withdrawal.

During my tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives and here in the U.S. Senate, following the attack of 9/11, I visited Afghanistan four times. Over the course of those visits, I saw progress being made by our troops and by civilians, by our NATO allies, and by Afghan partners.

My last visit was about 4 years ago just to the day about a week ago. At that time, the U.S. had less than 15,000 servicemembers in Afghanistan and our men and women were operating as advisers to the Afghan military. For the most part, the war seemed to be being fought by the Afghan military. Certainly, several terrorist groups had a presence in the region, but our military was preventing them from gaining the ability to strike our homeland.

President Biden's withdrawal plan, if it could be called that, led to the deadliest day for American servicemembers in Afghanistan since 2011. Thirteen of our servicemembers returned home in flag-draped caskets. Most of them were too young to remember 9/11, yet they laid down our lives to help Americans and Afghans flee the Taliban and find safety.

Americans remain in Afghanistan and thousands of our Afghan partners who are likely to face persecution or death at the hands of the Taliban have little hope of escaping the country. Our own office continues the effort to try to find and help those individuals remove themselves from a country where death seems certain.

I thank my staff, and I pray for those people, and I thank the Kansans who brought them to our attention.

People at home worried about Christians being persecuted for being Christians in Afghanistan. Those who serve in Afghanistan worried about someone who saved their life--an Afghan who saved their life or who was their interpreter or who was there side by side with them--now being left to the fate of the Taliban.

I am a member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittees that fund the Departments of Defense and State. We must hold hearings to examine the President's decision-making process and his consideration of the advice provided by his military and intelligence community leaders. We need to determine what steps, if any, were taken to plan for the withdrawal of Americans, with Special Immigrant Visas holders from Afghanistan.

We also need to hear directly from the administration how costly the lethal American weapons ended up in the hands of Taliban. The high- ranking officials who were responsible for this failure must answer to the American people why this operation failed so spectacularly and why their taxpayer dollars were left behind for the Taliban in the form of helicopters, combat vehicles, and weapons.

How is it that we came to rely upon the Taliban to help those we are responsible for, we owe a debt to, to be able to escape from the Taliban?

The administration must also be held accountable for its mismanagement and for the precarious security situation that this incompetent withdrawal created. Hastily withdrawing thousands of troops, apparently in the interest of a symbolic departure before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, made this world a more dangerous place. It created an environment that will allow radical terrorists to find refuge under the Taliban rule, and produced one that was the most pressing humanitarian crisis in history.

We deserve answers on how we will remedy this complex security situation, how we will help Afghan women and girls who are already being persecuted, and how we will learn from mistakes that were made to make certain it cannot happen again.

Finally, our veterans who served honorably in Afghanistan need to know that their service--and when I say ``finally,'' this is not the least important point. It is made at the end to make the point so clear. Our veterans who served honorably in Afghanistan need to know that their service was not--was not--in vain. More than 775,000 servicemembers were deployed to Afghanistan over the two decades since 9/11.

To those servicemembers: Make no mistake, your service has left a lasting and unparalleled impact upon the world.

Our country has been safe from a terrorist attack from the region of Afghanistan since their arrival in Afghanistan. Their work and efforts, their sacrifice and service made a difference for the safety of their fellow Americans. Those who served significantly reduced the threat from al-Qaida and brought Osama bin Laden to justice.

You deserve to know that the collapse of Afghanistan does not fall on your shoulders but on the failure of leadership here in the Nation's Capital City. Our sudden, disastrous, and poorly executed withdrawal opened old wounds and created new ones.

I commit as the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs to work side by side with our chairman, the Senator from Montana, to make certain that our veterans receive the care and attention they deserve and are entitled to, the respect and honor from their fellow American citizens, and the benefits that we promised to be available, available.

We have made the world a more dangerous place by our failing departure, and we have left Americans and our Afghan partners behind.

I served in the House of Representatives on 9/11, 20 years ago. I remember the day and the attack. I was one of the first Members of Congress to visit Ground Zero, where I saw the remains of the two Twin Towers--still smoke coming from the ground, steam--a bit like a construction site as they were trying to remove the rubble that were the remains of those towers.

First, family members were brought in to see the site where their loved ones died, which captured my heart as I watched them see where their loved ones died. After paying my respects to those family members and as I was leaving, I found a makeshift memorial that New Yorkers had placed there. It was a series of long tables at which people had brought flowers and cards, stuffed animals--teddy bears--and notes to pay tribute to those who had died just a few weeks before at that location.

I picked up one thing from that table of remembrance and honor and respect. It was a piece of notebook paper with a jagged edge along the side, torn out of a spiral notebook, with a child's handwriting:

Dear Daddy, how much I love you, how I hope Heaven is a wonderful place, and I hope, Daddy, that I live a life good enough to join you there someday.

Amanda, aged 12.

That moment has stuck with me for 20-plus years now--the point being that we have a responsibility to make sure that there are no more Amandas who suffer the fate that this young girl suffered that day with the death of her father. It occurred because of a terrorist attack occurring on the lands of Afghanistan, held by the Taliban, that allowed ISIS to attack the United States of America.

I have tried to change my conduct as a Member of Congress, since that day, to be a more responsible Member, to do the things necessary to be more worldly and understand what is going on, to make sure that I make the decisions that help make the world a safer place.

What we have seen in the last few weeks discourages me in making the world a safer place, but I rise to the call again to say we have responsibilities left in Afghanistan; we have responsibilities to the people we left behind to allow and to help them escape near certain death; and we also have responsibilities to those men and women who served in Afghanistan, who answered the call because they saw what happened to our Nation on 9/11 and said: I have something to give. I have something--perhaps my life--to give to see that this doesn't happen again.

I hope that we, despite the circumstances that we have seen in the last days, now have the ability as a U.S. Congress, as a Member of the U.S. Senate, to rise to the occasion in which we are still needed in this world to protect American lives, to save lives in Afghanistan, and to make certain--to make certain--that there are no more Amandas asking for the opportunity to see their fathers someday in Heaven.

The burdens are great for us. The responsibilities are real. Those who have failed us to date need to be held accountable, and the rest of us need to rise to the occasion to protect this country we love, the United States of America.

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