General Jack Keane called the current situation in Afghanistan “tragic” and “preventable” and said the Taliban had consolidated their oppressive rule and continued to harbor terrorists after America’s withdrawal from the war-torn country. “The fact is that Afghanistan is a haven for terrorism. The very reason we went there, the very reason we’ve been there for 20 years, is to make sure that terrorists don’t rise up again to attack the American people, and we’re right where we started,” Keane said on “Fox News Sunday ». “ US and allied troops in Afghanistan have kept the Taliban at bay, General Jack Keane has claimed. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty ImagesGen. Jack Keane says the Taliban “shut down all normal cultural aspirations that a nation or a people would have,” Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images “The Taliban returned to their draconian rule in the 1990s, denying people individual rights,” he said. “Women can’t work, they can’t go to school. They control all the culture, the dress, no music in the country,” Keane said of the militant group. “They just shut down all the normal cultural aspirations that a nation or a people would have.” The former general said the US went to war in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks to prevent the Taliban from returning to power and give terrorist groups like al-Qaeda a safe haven to plot against America and its allies. . “And what did this decision get us? He put the Taliban in charge of us again by harboring the Taliban — I mean, harboring Al Qaeda,” he said. , Keane said the killing earlier this month of Ayman al-Zawahiri – who took over as head of the terror group after Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in 2011 – as he stood on the balcony of his home in the capital Kabul showed that the Taliban still provide group shelter. “Al-Zawahiri’s killing brought up the fact that he lives in a Taliban house in a neighborhood that I’ve been to many times where senior Taliban leaders reside, and apparently, they protect the leader of al-Qaeda as well as his organization. And to this day, we have done nothing against this organization and we have done nothing against ISIS,” Keane said The sheer presence of US and allied troops in Afghanistan has kept the Taliban at bay and prevented the fundamentalist group from taking over the government as it did after Biden left, he said. The American military presence has also prevented al-Qaeda from gaining ground in the country and gaining strength. “The president thought he knew better. And he was very defiant and rejected all their advice. And then he presented a false narrative to the American people, which I find very disturbing. He said: My choice is to leave now, or put thousands of American troops back here to fight the Taliban and take casualties doing it,” Keane said. That decision led to the death of 13 members of the US military, who were killed in a suicide bombing outside Kabul airport, and the desertion of thousands of Afghans who had helped America in the 20-year war in Afghanistan. , “We are talking about an emergency evacuation that could have been prevented by the decision of the president if he had taken – if he had taken the advice of his advisers and advisers. And certainly, it was very tragic that we lost those soldiers going out,” Keane said. “We’ve left behind 80,000 people who still want to get out who we recognize as partners of the United States and they certainly overshadow this thing.”
