Cameron High School Student Asks Sen. Joe Manchin About Afghanistan
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A Cameron High School senior was among five students chosen to pick Sen. Joe Manchin's brain during a statewide Zoom meeting Wednesday.
More than 500 students from 26 schools across the Mountain State joined the call with Manchin, D-W.Va. From among them, five students, including Ian Bush, were chosen to ask a question to Manchin.
Bush was last in line to ask his question: Can you tell us how the withdrawal from Afghanistan may affect the future of our military? His question was asked immediately after another, which asked if a lack of American military presence in the Middle East would put the United States at risk. Due to their similar subject matter, Manchin answered both at once.
Manchin opened by saying that the withdrawal will almost certainly affect the future of how our military operates, saying that the US should avoid "nation-building" in future endeavors.
"When 9/11 happened, the mission was to go and get the people responsible for 3,000 Americans being killed on American soil," Manchin said. "That's where we should have dedicated all of our resources to. We should have never turned left and gone to Iraq or anything else until we completed that mission. We'd have had the whole rest of the world behind us; but we didn't. We split up. Hindsight being 20/20, we made a horrible mistake, and we stayed too long.
"When we killed Osama bin Laden in 2010, that would have been the time to exit, because we weren't changing the country," he continued. "We do not nation-build. We should not nation-build, for many reasons, but mostly because we know it doesn't work, it hasn't worked, and we shouldn't get bogged down to the point where the blood of Americans is spilled when the end result isn't going to make a difference for how those people ... are still going to be living."
With that said, Manchin said he felt the U.S. withdrawal from the region could have been handled better. Looking forward to the future, the senator added that he feels it's "only a matter of time" until a new political threat rises in the region.
Other questions Manchin fielded included topics such as preparing for interviews with the U.S. Service Academy board, preparing to enroll in the Space Force, and if Manchin, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has considered drafting legislation to protect the health of service personnel during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Following the hearing, Bush said Manchin's answer was one that was largely expected. Still, he was happy that he got to participate, noting it gave students a chance to see how their representatives thought.
"A lot of us are coming up on voting age, so to get his thoughts on current events, at home and around the world, is always a good thing … ," he said.