Rep. Brian Mast, R-Florida, on Sunday charged that American weapons “inventory” is now being used against the U.S. military members in Afghanistan.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Mast charged the inventory “was given to them by President [Joe] Biden.”
“That inventory that our U.S. service members are now having to fight against, we used those weapons, we carried those weapons across the battlefield,” he said.
“We know what they can mean in terms of harm, not just the improvised explosive devices and the vehicle-born IEDs, but the ordnance, the mortars, the body armor, the night vision that they now have that limit us from conducting nighttime operations that could help give us a little bit of an edge over those enemies, the surface-to-air assets they now have that they can put down our assets that are in the sky.”
The inventory, Mast added, “is the most advanced military weaponry that was given to them by President Biden. It makes this already inherently dangerous situation the gravest possible situation that our men and women could face.”
He added that the Taliban, al-Qaeda and ISIS-K are “joined at the hip.”
“The most holy word for any American has to be the word freedom. That is the opposite of what any of those terrorist groups stands for, al-Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS-K,” he said.
“They're all joined under the hip, just running under a slightly different flag. We need to stand up for what is our battle cry, that is freedom.”
Mast added that the U.S. withdrawal was just political optics.
“Their mantra was withdrawal at any price because of political optics… not a strategic objective of making America safer, getting our citizens out alive, making our service members in a safer world that they go out there and conduct their operations, making our homeland safer.”
“Their only strategy was to say how can we make things politically better optically,” he said. “That was their objective.”
Instead, he lamented what was actually accomplished was it left “every aspect of geopolitics and of safety across the globe in the most dire possible situation.”
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Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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