WASHINGTON, D.C. – CBS News Political Analyst Leonard Steinhorn told WKOK’s On The Mark Friday morning he hopes to see investigations into what intelligence officials knew before Thursday’s deadly attack in Kabul.
He says people ought to look at whether the US Military was giving a ‘glass half-full notion’ of how prepared the Afghan army and government were, after spending billions of dollars over the years, “And if Joe Biden himself was looking with sort of rose-colored glasses about how this thing is going to work out, yes, he needs to be held accountable on all this and I hope people do really investigate how all this stuff happened.”
Steinhorn says Thursday’s tragedy also has a close ally upset with the U.S., “The British are upset because their own people were sort of put in jeopardy and I’m not all together sure that they were as well brought into the planning and implementation as they would’ve liked to have been. I think that’s what’s irritating them, ‘hey, don’t catch us by surprise, we’ve been your long-term allies.’”
However, Steinhorn says what led to Thursday’s events in Kabul were not all Joe Biden decisions – they were American decisions dating back 20 years, “Once we decided to go in there and strike at Al-Qaeda, the question then becomes, did we really have an obligation for nation building and could we build a nation in a country we really didn’t understand? We lived through that before in Vietnam and we weren’t successful, and Joe Biden is basically the last man standing.”
Steinhorn also says it’s still too early to tell how much this will affect President Biden politically. Hear more of Steinhorn’s comments here.
