Tara Copp for AP (“Top former US generals say failures of Biden administration in planning drove chaotic fall of Kabul“):
The top two U.S. generals who oversaw the evacuation of Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban in August 2021 blamed the Biden administration for the chaotic departure, telling lawmakers Tuesday that it inadequately planned for the evacuation and did not order it in time.
The rare testimony by former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command retired Gen. Frank McKenzie publicly exposed for the first time the strain and differences the military leaders had with the Biden administration in the final days of the war. Two of those key differences included that the military had advised that the U.S. keep at least 2,500 service members in Afghanistan to maintain stability and a concern that the State Department was not moving fast enough to get an evacuation started.
The remarks also contrasted with an internal White House review of the administration’s decisions which found that President Joe Biden’s decisions had been “severely constrained” by previous withdrawal agreements negotiated by former President Donald Trump and blamed the military, saying top commanders said they had enough resources to handle the evacuation.
Thirteen U.S. service members were killed by a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate in the final days of the war, as the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
Thousands of panicked Afghans and U.S. citizens desperately tried to get on U.S. military flights that were airlifting people out. In the end the military was able to rescue more than 130,000 civilians before the final U.S. military aircraft departed.
That chaos was the end result of the State Department failing to call for an evacuation of U.S. personnel until it was too late, Milley and McKenzie told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“On 14 August the non-combatant evacuation operation decision was made by the Department of State and the U.S. military alerted, marshalled, mobilized and rapidly deployed faster than any military in the world could ever do,” Milley said.
But the State Department’s decision came too late, Milley said.
“The fundamental mistake, the fundamental flaw was the timing of the State Department,” Milley said. “That was too slow and too late.”
In a lengthy statement late Tuesday, the National Security Council took issue with the generals’ remarks, saying that Biden’s hard decision was the right thing to do and part of his commitment to get the U.S. out of America’s longest war.
The president “was not going to send another generation of troops to fight and die in a conflict that had no end in sight,” the NSC said. “We have also demonstrated that we do not need a permanent troop presence on the ground in harm’s way to remain vigilant against terrorism threats.”
Dan Lamothe, Abigail Hauslohner and Leigh Ann Caldwell for WaPo (“Republicans continue to hammer Biden for Afghan exit“):
The top two generals who oversaw the deadly evacuation of Afghanistan faced renewed scrutiny Tuesday as House Republicans escalated their campaign to hold President Biden accountable for the fiasco and Democrats accused Donald Trump of setting the conditions for the Kabul government’s collapse.
Retired Gens. Mark A. Milley and Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, career military officers who served in senior roles under both presidents, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee as part of its oversight investigation of the United States’ calamitous exit, in August 2021, from a 20-year war.
McKenzie said that although the Pentagon had developed a plan to withdraw all U.S. troops, diplomats, citizens and at-risk Afghan partners months before the Taliban’s return to power, Biden instead decided to leave open the U.S. Embassy and withdraw all but a few hundred military personnel — ultimately leaving tens of thousands in harm’s way.
“I think the fundamental mistake — the fundamental flaw — was the timing of the State Department call” for evacuation, Milley said. “I think that was too slow and too late, and that then caused the series of events that result in the very last couple of days.”
The recurring political spotlight on the conflict’s closing days, marked by scenes of gruesome violence and desperation, has forced Democrats to confront a dark moment during Biden’s tenure as president while he campaigns against his predecessor for a second term as commander in chief.
Many Democratic lawmakers have joined their Republican colleagues in criticizing the administration’s handling of the withdrawal. But with the anticipated election rematch between Trump and Biden months away, they face pressure to defend his position that it was Trump in 2020 who boxed in Biden by accepting a deal with the Taliban that put few conditions on a U.S. departure the following year.
Throughout the hearing, both sides took turns trying to demonstrate their respect for the generals while prodding them to acknowledge the other party’s president as the person ultimately responsible for the evacuation fiasco.
Elsewhere:
- CNN, “Top generals who oversaw US withdrawal from Afghanistan slam State Department for delaying emergency evacuation”
- USA Today, “Afghanistan evacuation was ‘too slow and too late,’ ex-military officials tell Congress“
- BBC, “Ex-US generals who oversaw Afghan exit describe chaos and challenges of withdrawal“
My old friend Joshua Foust is angry about the coverage. He was particularly incensed by Lamothe’s framing in the WaPo lede:
A long time defense correspondent describing this as “House Republicans escalate their campaign to hold President Biden accountable for the fiasco” is so dishonest it’s hard to know where to begin. Again, Dan Lamothe knows exactly what he’s doing when he writes this copy and he does not care.
I’ve read Lamothe for years and have never found him biased, but my lens is different. Rather than trying to harm Biden here, I suspect he’s simply reflecting the frustration and outrage so many on his beat felt at what was absolutely a fiasco. Indeed, that was my real-time reaction, as some post headlines from those days show:
- Biden Blamed for Afghan Fiasco (August 16, 2021)
- The Afghan Evacuation Horror Show Continues (August 20, 2021)
- Trump and Pompeo Set Afghanistan Fiasco in Motion (August 21, 2021)
- Defense Blames State for Afghan Fiasco (September 30, 2021)
I don’t know how you can see the immediate withdrawal otherwise. Or, for that matter, deny that the Biden team rallied rather quickly and salvaged the situation. And, even when the worst was unfolding, it was obvious that there was plenty of blame to go around for the waste of twenty years of failed nation-building.
Nor, incidentally, is this testimony from Milley and McKenzie new. They were saying the same thing in September 2021. And, as I noted at the time,
This deflection strikes me as semantic bullshit. It’s true that NEOs are authorized by State and carried out by DoD. But, as the “senior administration official” implies, had DoD pushed hard for one, State would almost certainly have acquiesced.
My strong sense, therefore, is that DoD leadership had an overly optimistic picture of how long they had to carry out operations before the Ghani government collapsed. From all accounts, nobody at the senior level of the US Government thought that it was going to collapse damn near instantaneously. If, however, State balked at ordering a NEO in the face of DoD demands, it was up to Austin, Milley, or the CENTCOM commander to go to the President and/or the NSC to press their case.
There is, therefore, no plausible scenario where State bears the bulk of the blame. Either all of the key players share equal blame for failing to anticipate the collapse of the Ghani government or President Biden himself overruled DoD in favor of State’s recommendation.
Still, even though he spent a year and a half in country as a Human Terrain Analyst and then devoted years researching and writing about as a blogger and think tanker, Foust is more worried about the consequences of this renewed attention rather than an autopsy of the Afghanistan exit:
It’s hard not to conclude that the DC-based press corps (reporters and pundits alike) simply wants to experience a national collapse because it would be fun to cover, and I don’t like thinking that nor do I know what any of us can do about it.
Biden faced down an openly hostile, warmongering press, defiant CIA stealing evacuation seats for its death squads, and a class of decadent viceroys to do the right thing and end our presence in Afghanistan. Will any future president ever end a war again? Don’t expect it if this is the outcome.
If the election had happened in August of 2021, it may well have cost Biden a second term. But I suspect half of American voters have forgotten we were ever in Afghanistan, much less have a strong opinion on the nature of the exit. American attention spans on foreign policy matters are notoriously short-lived.
And, apparently, it doesn’t sell many papers or generate many clicks, either. As best I can tell, neither the New York Times nor even the Murdock-owned Wall Street Journal covered the hearings at all, and I had to search the WaPo archives to find the above story even though I knew it existed. Of the major outlets I scanned this morning, only the AP featured the story prominently.
Congressional Republicans, not surprisingly, are trying to leverage a dark moment in the Biden presidency for political advantage. In the short term, at least, it’s not working.
