(USA Features) A Republican lawmaker warned on Friday that, following the deadly debacle in Kabul on Thursday in which 13 U.S. military personnel were killed, a new era of national security threats to the United States has begun under President Joe Biden’s tenure.
“The greatness of America has been challenged, and it has been tested, and Joe Biden is our commander in chief and has failed miserably, and he’s gotten people killed in the process, and this isn’t over,” Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, himself a veteran and a former White House physician, told Newsmax TV’s Greg Kelly.
“This is going to set a precedent,” Jackson, who stepped down from his White House post to run for Congress in Texas last year, predicted.
“Bad things are going to happen on the national security front for many weeks to come, and we’re going to see horrible images coming out of Afghanistan,” he said.
The freshman lawmaker said it appears to him that Biden really is not aware of what’s happening on the ground in the war-torn country, where thousands of Americans, third-country nationals, and Afghan refugees are crowding the international airport in Kabul as the Taliban has retaken control over most of the country.
Biden has said that more than 100,000 Afghan nationals have been evacuated over the past few weeks.
“I think there’s a shadow presidency at this particular point,” said Jackson.
“I don’t think his own team really tells him what’s going on because I don’t think they think he’s cognitively able to process the information and make the decisions,” he continued.
“I think somebody else is really putting all the pieces together,” the Texas Republican noted further.
“This is a profound lack of leadership and that’s probably adding to it, but we as members of Congress, we have to get together; we have to figure out how this happened,” he said regarding the attack against Americans in Kabul.
He went on to say he had little confidence that the current administration and its leadership team will be able to regain control of the situation in Afghanistan as the deadline for withdrawing approaches on Tuesday and get the remaining people out safely.
“I know people will say there’s time to point fingers later, that’s true; but the disastrous leadership that got us into this is not going to be the leadership that gets us out of this,” said Jackson.
“There’s certain people’s heads (that) have to roll right now, and we have to get some people that can do the job,” he noted, becoming the latest Republican call on members of Biden’s administration to resign.
He added that Congress ought to be recalled to Washington, D.C., by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to help the White House figure out the best way forward to safely extract people from Afghanistan and “stop the bleeding” caused by bad decision-making.
Jackson concluded by saying that all U.S. forces are supposed to be out of the country by Aug. 31 but that he’s not sure if all Americans and Afghan allies will be evacuated by that date.