WASHINGTON (CN) — Lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday questioned a pair of military leaders who oversaw the U.S.’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, as Republicans seek to pin responsibility for the 2021 exit on the Biden administration.
Retired General Mark Milley, who previously served as chairman of the Defense Department’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired General Frank McKenzie, formerly head of U.S. Central Command, appeared before lawmakers as part of the House’s ongoing inquiry into the Afghanistan withdrawal.
The August 2021 exfiltration, which bookended a nearly two-decade military engagement in Afghanistan, has long been a flashpoint for Republicans in Congress who frame the withdrawal as the Biden administration’s diplomatic and military failure.
They need not look far for evidence — the withdrawal ended with the total collapse of the Afghan government and a Taliban takeover.
The military pullout also resulted in harrowing scenes at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport as U.S. diplomats and other non-combat personnel fled the country, an operation that culminated in an IS-claimed terrorist attack that killed 13 U.S. service members.
Texas Representative Michael McCaul, the foreign affairs panel’s Republican chair, again blasted the Biden administration Tuesday, accusing the White House of “refus[ing] to acknowledge their failures” in withdrawing from Afghanistan.
“As the saying goes: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” McCaul said, “and fail they did.”
Democrats, meanwhile, have been quick to foist blame on former President Donald Trump, who in 2020 negotiated a deal with the Taliban in which Washington agreed to begin decreasing the number of troops stationed in Afghanistan.
New York Representative Gregory Meeks contended that the Trump-era accord, known as the Doha agreement, “undercut the United States’ leverage with the Taliban,” adding that the Trump administration also lacked a comprehensive plan for withdrawing from Afghanistan.
Meeks suggested that lawmakers would be “playing politics” by simply focusing on the Biden administration’s actions, and that Congress should examine “the entire 20 years of being in Afghanistan, not just the last few months.”
Milley agreed that the withdrawal should be considered “on a continuum.”
“Anything as complex as a war is not caused by a single causal factor,” he told lawmakers.
While the former Joint Chiefs chairman agreed that the Doha agreement helped set the stage for the “endgame” of the Afghanistan withdrawal, he added that there were many lessons to be learned from two decades of war.
Milley stopped short of blaming the Biden administration for the events of the pullout, but chalked up the collapse of the Afghan government and Taliban takeover to a “strategic failure” and said he had warned that a unilateral withdrawal could have such consequences.
McKenzie, the former Central Command chief, provided a viewpoint less charitable to President Biden. The retired general told lawmakers that he had met with the Trump administration in 2020 to present options for an Afghanistan withdrawal and that the president had landed on a pathway that would have left a small contingent of U.S. forces in-country while evacuating diplomatic staff and at-risk Afghans, such as military interpreters.
The Biden administration and the State Department, however, opted for a full military withdrawal and sat on plans to evacuate embassy staff, he said.
“We had a complete plan to execute that task as well, but were not ordered to do so,” McKenzie told the committee. “This was not a military decision.”
Complicating things further, the former general testified, the State Department was slow to provide military officials with plans for evacuating the embassy in Kabul and that that delay held off a withdrawal until August, when the situation on the ground was “in extremis.” The rocky evacuation was a direct result of State Department delays, McKenzie contended.
“It remains my opinion that, if there is culpability in this attack, it lies with the policy decisions” made in Washington, he said.
Milley appeared to agree that there should not have been a delay in evacuating embassy personnel from Kabul.
“My assessment at the time, and the general consensus of the military, was that the embassy should be coming out roughly at the same time that we were coming out,” he said, adding that military officials had long called for the State Department to evacuate the embassy as early as possible.
Tuesday’s hearing comes nearly three years after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal and the attack at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate. Several family members of servicemembers killed in the bombing were present at the committee meeting.
The White House has long heaped blame on the Trump administration for the events of the Afghanistan withdrawal, arguing that it simply followed through on plans laid by the former president as part of the Doha agreement. The Biden administration has said its predecessor’s lack of planning limited its options for extricating from the conflict.
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