That’s the result after this week’s testimony in Congress by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Mark Milley; Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin; and CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie.
In August, President Joe Biden told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that none of his military advisers offered that he saves an extra force of 2,500 troops in the country to ensure that Afghanistan did not fall to the Taliban.
The military brass told Congress that they had, actually, presented that choice to Biden. Milley kept stressing: he noted that in November 2020, then-President Donald Trump had directed all troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan, but that after the military warned him of a potential collapse, he rescinded the order. Trump wanted to pull out of the country, but he listened to his military advisers.
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Unlike Joe Biden, who insisted on withdrawal — but on Sep. 11, not May 1, which insured disaster.
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Not only did the new date break the accord Trump had achieved with the Taliban — in discussions started by Obama, by the way — but it also placed the retreat smack in the middle of the summer “fighting season,” rather than the wintertime.
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The generals eventually threw Biden under the bus— and he takes it, unfortunately, after telling the country that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
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But note how the generals carefully sidestepped their own responsibility. We didn’t learn enough about the curious decision to abandon the Bagram airbase. We didn’t learn much about the intelligence failures that caused U.S. forces to be so surprised by the sudden turn of events.
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The U.S did not learn much about why Gen. Milley said in 2013 that the “conditions are set” for the U.S. to win the war in Afghanistan and that the Taliban were no longer capable of overthrowing the country.
It is a wonder that none of the military leaders accountable for the Afghanistan debacle has left, while Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller willingly sits in the brig for having called them out publicly on social media, giving voice to what thousands of other service members were thinking.
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Asked by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) why he had not resigned yet, Milley said that doing so would be a “political” act — as if Milley had not been engaged in politics, on the left’s behalf, since 2020.
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But at least Milley was held responsible, though briefly and incompletely, by Congress. What about the other generals and admirals who waded into politics in 2020 — who trashed Trump, and praised Biden for his supposed military acumen?
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