Opinion: top US generals puncture Joe Biden’s defense of Afghanistan withdrawal
If the old joke is true – that in Washington the definition of a blunder tells the truth in public – then Milley and the other military leaders who testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday made many blunders.
In a U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee televised hearing featuring Milley, the Commander of CENTCOM Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, himself a retired four-star general and former commander from CENTCOM, all told a lot of truth. .
Milley also said that the Trump and Biden administrations erred in setting specific dates for the US withdrawal rather than making it a condition-based withdrawal.
Milley criticized the US intelligence community for missing “the scale and scope, as well as the speed” of the collapse of the Afghan government, testifying: “All the intelligence assessments, we were all wrong. There is no doubt about it. and a failure on the evaluation of the information of 11 days in August, there is no one who called that. ”
The fruits of this failure have clearly emerged from the actions of the Taliban in the past month alone.
No wonder, then, that General McKenzie testified that he was not convinced that al Qaeda and ISIS would not regroup in Afghanistan now that the United States had withdrawn from the country.
The result of Tuesday’s hearing was that even the most senior U.S. generals were unable to defend the debacle that has unfolded in Afghanistan in recent weeks, a disaster owned by President Biden, even though it has was brought about by President Trump’s hapless “peace” with the Taliban which resulted in the Doha deal.