Michigan congressman Peter Meijer says the U.S. faces three major crises, perhaps more, because of the way the Biden administration exited Afghanistan last week.
These three crises, said Meijer, are veterans’ mental health, diminished U.S. standing with our Allies, and the rise of new extremists emboldened by our humiliating exit.
Meijer told the Washington Examiner there were many things done wrong in the previous administration, but none were quite as consequential as this. He is not alone in that reaction.
“I have had that sentiment expressed to me by some of our allies who did not express a fondness for the former president,” Meijer said. “But he said, ‘You have to say, this never would have happened under him.’”
Meijer said many extremist groups around the world are rallying around the Taliban victory over the U.S. “They feel a new sense of enthusiasm and inspiration that the United States was defeated in Afghanistan and defeated in such a humiliating fashion.”
Biden promised that he could stop terrorist attacks plotted in Afghanistan with “over the horizon” surveillance and strikes. It is a pledge he will be unable to fulfill, much like his pledge to get all Americans out of Afghanistan. The U.S. has lost all of its key assets who were tracking radical militants and their plots.
Meijer also discussed the mental health of veterans who served overseas. “It feels like any sacrifices that were made didn’t contribute to a mission — I mean, that mission has been essentially erased,” he said. “Whatever gains were made were erased. But they’re also seeing it done in such a way that left behind our Afghan allies that worked beside us — abandoned, betrayed… I know a lot of veterans who are still working around the clock to get their friends out. And when they’re not able to, we’re going to see some very troubling ramifications.”
Meijer said text messages to the veterans’ crisis hotline have doubled in the last month. “This is a very dark moment,” he said. The suicide rate for veterans already outpaced civilian suicides long before the final weeks of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Meijer, a Grand Rapids, Michigan, Republican, and Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, both Iraq War veterans, traveled to Kabul to review the situation at Hamid Karzai International Airport less than a week before the chaotic and disastrous evacuation effort concluded, leaving thousands of American citizens, journalists, and green card-holders behind. The Biden administration was quite displeased that they made the trip, apparently upset at the independent oversight from another branch of government.
Meijer said that American standing in the world has been greatly diminished.
“’Can we rely on the U.S.?'” Meijer said, offering a hypothetical dialogue among U.S. allies. “‘We thought the U.S. was this powerful force for good and stability in the world, and this is the way this ends?’ I think it’s disillusioning. It was a major blow to our credibility. I have yet to talk to a single one of our allies, whether in Europe or the Middle East, who is not just livid and furious with how this ended.”
Meijer, who deployed to Iraq and served with an intelligence unit at joint US-Iraqi bases in Baghdad, says there is a code among warriors that you don’t leave your brothers behind, and that is the big thing they struggled with, “especially because in many cases we gave these people our words, and now we are going back on that. We are violating that promise that we couldn’t keep despite so many veterans trying desperately to keep that.”
Meijer said our duty and mission is to continue to get our citizens out who have been left behind by the Biden administration and our military leaders. “We need to continue the mission to get folks out,” he said. “Once we do everything we can to support our allies, when they’re back here in the US, then we shift to ensuring we never get in this position again.”
Meijer said America has to have a full accounting of what happened. He wants to see a bipartisan, independent commission modeled after the 9/11 Commission that would look at the entirety of the conflict. “Not just the botched withdrawal,” he said, “but how it got so bad for so long.”
Meijer said we also need to make sure that Congress doesn’t, again, delegate all of its authorities with war powers to the executive in such a blind fashion. “We need to make sure that we retake those authorizations, retake those responsibilities, so that Congress is again engaged and involved and not just an idle bystander,” he said. “Because clearly, this is not something we can trust the president and the president alone to do to any degree of satisfaction.”
