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- Sen. Graham argued on Friday that the US military should extend its withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan.
- Graham and retired Gen. Jack Keane wrote in a WSJ op-ed that the US should also extend operations outside Kabul.
- "[Biden] must be willing to accept the risk that the Taliban will attack our forces," they wrote.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and one of the Senate's most outspoken war hawks, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Friday that the US military should extend its withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan and risk being attacked by the Taliban.
Graham, who's long supported indefinite American occupations abroad, and his op-ed co-author, retired Gen. Jack Keane, argued that the US government must not fully withdraw until many thousands of Afghan allies are evacuated. They urged President Joe Biden to keep US troops in Afghanistan past his August 31 withdrawal deadline and create pathways for Afghan allies to travel from across the country to the Kabul airport for evacuation.
"President Biden must keep forces in place long enough to evacuate those to whom we owe a great debt," they wrote. "He must be willing to accept the risk that the Taliban will attack our forces."
They argued it would be "dishonorable" to apply "anything less" than the "full force" of the US military to the effort.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said this week that the US military would stay in the country until they've evacuated every American who wants to leave Afghanistan. Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the press on Wednesday that they did not have the capability to send troops into Kabul or anywhere else in the country to help bring people to the airport. Because of chaos and insecurity in Kabul, the military has so far been unable to meet its goal of moving 5,000 to 9,000 people through the Kabul airport and out of the country every day.
The president is set to deliver a speech on Friday with more information about the evacuation effort.
In a tweet on Friday morning, Graham insisted that Biden should be "impeached" for "dereliction of duty" if the US military fails to evacuate any Americans or Afghans who worked with US forces.
"If we leave any Americans behind, or if we leave thousands of Afghans who fought bravely alongside us behind, President Joe Biden deserves to be impeached for a High Crime and Misdemeanor of Dereliction of Duty," he wrote.
Biden has been clear that he doesn't believe the effort to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan justifies the loss of additional US soldiers.
"After 20 years - a trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces, 2,448 Americans killed, 20,722 more wounded, and untold thousands coming home with unseen trauma to their mental health - I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome," Biden said in a speech last month.