Rep. Jake Auchincloss and Seth Moulton, both of whom are former Marines, joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston Wednesday to discuss their efforts to ensure Afghan translators and others who helped U.S. troops are able to safely escape the threat they face from the Taliban. They also shared their thoughts on the legacy of the 'forever wars' and ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and who died Wednesday.
“Just to put it in stark terms to everybody, what a potential civil war in Afghanistan means: if the Taliban takes over, they will seek out all of our allies — the people who served beside us," Moulton said. And they will kill them.”
“And, if they can, they will rape and murder their kids and wives in front of them first," the congressman added. "That’s what the Taliban does. That’s the promise they have made to these American allies.”
Auchincloss reiterated the importance of fulfilling promises to American allies. “Under President Trump, we dishonored that commitment with the Kurds, and we cannot repeat that in Afghanistan,” he said.
A visa program already exists to bring allied Afghan and Iraqi translators and interpreters to the United States, but Moulton said that program is insufficient in the face of the United States’ impending exit. The program, he said, takes an average of 800 days to get one visa, but the United States is on track to pull out of Afghanistan in just 80.
“We have to execute the most honorable withdrawal that we can — and that means saving as many allies as we can from certain execution at the hands of the Taliban,” Moulton added. “Some people in the administration seem to be concerned about the image of a mass withdrawal. I can assure you that the image of a mass slaughter would be far worse.”
Braude also asked the congressmen about the legacy of Rumsfeld, who served as the secretary of Defense under George W. Bush and was key in starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moulton said that, in part, his legacy is a generation of Democratic veterans motivated to get into politics to work to fix the “failed leadership” that got the United States into the war in Iraq.
“His legacy as it relates to Afghanistan and Iraq is engaging the United States in two failed ‘forever wars’ — two wars that we spent decades on, some $6 trillion dollars, and tens of thousands of lives without ever giving the military a clear mission that it could actually execute,” Auchincloss said. “Now what we need to do is repair America’s global standing.”
WATCH: Congressmen and former Marines on the 'forever wars'
