Fox News anchor Chris Wallace suggested Friday that any potential attack on U.S. soil launched from Afghanistan following the Biden administration’s exit from the country could mean “curtains for the Biden presidency.”
Wallace made the comment a day after 13 U.S. service members were killed and more than a dozen others were injured in a bombing attack outside the airport in Kabul. More than 100 Afghans were also killed in the attack, which officials have attributed to the terrorist group ISIS-K.
“As bad as yesterday was, the president can come back from that, but if there is an attack on the U.S. homeland from Afghanistan after the withdrawal of all of our troops, that could be curtains for the Biden presidency,” Wallace said on Fox as the network’s Bill Hemmer muttered “God forbid.”
Various defense and foreign policy experts have pointed out that the removal of U.S. troops could precede Afghanistan becoming a hotbed of terrorist activity amid Taliban rule. The Taliban’s vows to honor women’s rights and not punish former enemies have also been met with deep skepticism.
President Biden has repeatedly defended the U.S.’s decision to withdraw troops, however, he was further pressed on that decision Thursday following the attack near the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, the deadliest day for U.S. forces in the country in roughly a decade.
“Imagine where we’d be if I had indicated, on May the 1st, I was not going to renegotiate an evacuation date; we were going to stay there,” Biden told reporters on Thursday. “I’d have only one alternative: Pour thousands of more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won, relative — is why the reason we went in the first place.”
“I have never been of the view that we should be sacrificing American lives to try to establish a democratic government in Afghanistan — a country that has never once in its entire history been a united country, and is made up — and I don’t mean this in a derogatory — made up of different tribes who have never, ever, ever gotten along with one another,” he continued.
The United Kingdom also reported that two of its citizens and a child had died from the attack, while several more were injured.
“These were innocent people and it is a tragedy that as they sought to bring their loved ones to safety in the UK they were murdered by cowardly terrorists,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said in a statement on Friday.