Seth Moulton continues to defend unauthorized trip to Kabul airport
"At the end of the day, I don’t care what pundits in Washington are saying."
Two U.S. congressmen who made an unauthorized trip to the airport in Kabul last week defended themselves Sunday amid accusations that their visit was an unwelcome distraction from the evacuation effort.
Afghanistan
“Those accusations are just not true,” Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“At the end of the day, I don’t care what pundits in Washington are saying,” he added. “They’ve been wrong about this war for 20 years.”
Moulton and the other congressman, Rep. Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican, visited the airport days before a suicide bombing there killed as many as 170 civilians and 13 members of the American military.
Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Meijer said he and Moulton were “uniquely positioned” among members of Congress to make the trip, given their backgrounds.
“Not only have we both served with the military in Iraq, we’d also spent time in Afghanistan as civilians,” Meijer said, adding, “We were uniquely situated to be able to get in, get out, be as quiet as possible, but also take away as much information as possible.”
More than 70 House members are veterans, according to the Republican minority on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
The two lawmakers also continued to criticize the Biden administration’s handling of the evacuation, while acknowledging that their trip to Kabul had changed their minds about President Joe Biden’s Tuesday deadline for a full withdrawal, which they had previously urged the administration to extend.
“We realized that we did not have that leverage,” Meijer said. “We were wholly dependent on the cooperation of the Taliban.”
He added: “This is the least worst of the options that are before us.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com