The U.S. bombing of a Doctors Without Borders-run hospital in Afghanistan was likely a mistake but could shift Americans' feelings about U.S. involvement there, political commentator Pat Buchanan tells
Newsmax TV.
"It might change the attitudes of the American people. It's got to be investigated," Buchanan said Tuesday to John Bachman on "Newsmax Now."
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"I don't believe the Americans would deliberately attack and destroy a hospital that they thought was a hospital, but it's got to be investigated."
But with the northern Afghan city of Kunduz having been blitzed last week by Taliban gunmen who held the city for three days, the U.S. military must stay put, according to Buchanan, who was senior adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.
"If the United States pulls its 10,000 troops out of Afghanistan, everything that we invested in for the last 14 years is in danger of falling," he said.
Buchanan — author of
"The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority," published by Crown Forum — added:
"If we want to preserve it, we have to have the troops in Afghanistan, 10,000 of them at least, or you hear now about 5,000 after 2016."
"That's the case that's going to be made and it's not very palatable or enticing one — but it may be realistic. It's the American people who are going to have to decide whether you want to let it go completely down the chute, which it would."
International medical charity Doctors Without Borders withdrew from Kunduz on Sunday after the deadly airstrike destroyed its hospital, killing 19 people.
The international medical charity blames the U.S. airstrike for the fatalities. But Afghan officials say helicopter gunships were returning fire from Taliban fighters who were hiding inside the hospital.
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