Incorrect U.S. military and intelligence assumptions about Afghanistan’s governance and military structures led to the country’s fall to the Taliban—but the failures that occurred during the largest evacuation airlift in U.S. history were not the military’s fault, the Pentagon’s top military and civilian leaders testified to Congress Tuesday.
As those leaders begin the arduous process of identifying what went wrong in the 20-year-war, key questions about the conflict’s final two weeks have emerged. Did the Biden administration ignore military advice to keep troops on the ground longer, and once those concerns were taken seriously, was it too little, too late?
At a hearing of the Senate Armed Service Committee, members on both sides of the aisle had pointed questions about the rushed exit and the longer-term mistakes. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., cited an interview last month with ABC’s George Stephanopolous in which President Joe Biden said none of the commanders had advised him to leave a small troop presence in Afghanistan.
Both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley testified that commanders’ concerns—that a full withdrawal could hasten Taliban takeover—were conveyed to the White House in the months leading up to the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline.
But it wasn’t until the Taliban had taken control of Afghanistan, Milley said, that the chairman was asked for his best military assessment on leaving any troops past the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline. The president asked for his view on Aug. 25, he said.
Milley said at that point, it would have required ordering thousands of additional troops to land in Kabul by Sept. 1 to fight ISIS-K and thousands of Taliban fighters,
“That would have resulted in significant casualties on the U.S. side,” Milley said. His recommendation was to continue with the full drawdown.
Austin conceded that the military had also made mistakes.
“We need to consider some uncomfortable truths,” the defense secretary said in his opening remarks. “We did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in their senior ranks… We did not anticipate the snowball effect caused by the deals that Taliban commanders struck with local leaders in the wake of the Doha agreement, that the Doha agreement itself had a demoralizing effect on Afghan soldiers, and that we failed to fully grasp that there was only so much for which—and for whom—many of the Afghan forces would fight.”
“We helped build a state, but we could not forge a nation,” Austin said.
Members of Congress from both parties have expressed doubt that the Taliban’s swift victory was unforeseeable, particularly since years worth of reports from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction had warned about hollow and easily corrupted elements of the Afghan National Army and its leadership ranks.
“Throughout the spring, we saw many districts quickly fall to the Taliban—many without a shot fired,” said SASC ranking member Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. “Members of this committee, on both sides of the aisle, spent months urging the administration to evacuate Americans and our Afghan partners sooner. But President Biden and his advisers didn’t listen to his combat commander. He didn’t listen to Congress. And he failed to anticipate what all of us knew would happen.”
Austin said he strongly disagreed that anyone predicted the country falling to the Taliban as fast as it did.
“The fact that the Afghan army we and our partners trained simply melted away—in many cases without firing a shot—took us all by surprise. It would be dishonest to claim otherwise.”
But responsibility for Kabul’s fall does not fall solely on the Biden administration, Milley told the lawmakers, even though he had advised the Trump administration last fall not to pull all U.S. troops from the country.
“My analysis was that an accelerated withdrawal without meeting necessary conditions risks losing the substantial gains made in Afghanistan, damaging U.S. credibility, and could precipitate a general collapse of the ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] and the Afghan government resulting in a complete Taliban takeover or a general civil war,” Milley testified. But “this has been a 10-year multi-administration drawdown, not a 19-month or a 19-day withdrawal.”
One early point, and perhaps one of the few where Austin and Milley will reveal a fissure in the wake of Kabul, is the impact it’s had on the United States’ standing with partners around the world.
“Damage is one word that could be used, yes,” Milley said in response to Senate questioning.
“I think our credibility remains solid,” Austin said a moment later.
On the evacuation itself, the two leaders were unified in their message: the military did everything it could do, within the limits set by the Biden administration and the then-looming Sept. 1 deadline.
Military planning for the evacuation itself had begun by May of this year. In the weeks leading up to the fall of Kabul, and even in the days before, as the Taliban encircled the city, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby would not call the military’s increased presence and movements a non-combatant evacuation—because the State Department was in charge and had not called for one.
Austin said the State Department’s late call for NEO and the lack of having Afghans fully cleared with Special Immigrant Visas to depart created one of the most complex and dangerous airlifts in the military’s history.
By the time Kabul fell, the State Department had only cleared a few thousand of the estimated tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked for the U.S. during the 20-year-war and whose lives were now at risk.
Americans were left behind too.
“We are still working to get Americans out who wish to leave. We did not get out all of our Afghan allies enrolled in the Special Immigrant Visa program,” Austin said. “We take that very seriously.”
But much of that blame also lies on the hundreds of military supervisors or contractors who had hired those Afghans, who departed the country, moved on or retired without providing all of the paperwork Afghan interpreters and others would need to get the visa, said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.
“DOD has been cited as the major problem in getting those documents,” Shaheen said.
Austin said, “As for when we started evacuations: we offered input to the State Department’s decision, mindful of their concerns that moving too soon might actually cause the very collapse of the Afghan government that we all wanted to avoid, and that moving too late would put our people and our operations at greater risk.”
By the time the State Department cleared the way for the military to begin official non-combatant evacuations over the weekend, Kabul had fallen and the flag had already been taken down from the U.S. Embassy. Diplomatic staff fled to Hamid Karzai International Airport. A small but growing force of Marines from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit were already on hand, but they were quickly outnumbered by thousands of Afghans who rushed to the airport desperate to flee.
“In the span of just two days—from Aug. 13 to 15—we went from working alongside a democratically elected, long-time partner government to coordinating warily with a long-time enemy,” Austin said. “To be clear, those first two days were difficult,” Austin said.
The Pentagon has also been criticized by lawmakers for closing Bagram Air Base before all U.S. citizens had been evacuated, which made the Kabul airport the single point of failure for getting out.
Austin pushed back on that too.
“Retaining Bagram would have required putting as many as five thousand U.S. troops in harm’s
way, just to operate and defend it,” Austin said. “And it would have contributed little to the mission that we had been assigned: to protect and defend our embassy some 30 miles away. That distance from Kabul also rendered Bagram of little value in the evacuation. Staying at Bagram—even for counter-terrorism purposes—meant staying at war in Afghanistan, something that the president made clear he would not do.”
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