GOPer rips prez for calling op ‘extraordinary success’
The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee accused President Biden Wednesday of being “delusional” about the “extraordinary disaster” of the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which 13 service members were killed.
“The president stood in the East Room of the White House and called the withdrawal ‘an extraordinary success.’ I fear the president is delusional,” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said in his opening statement of a hearing on the operation.
“This wasn’t an extraordinary success. It was an extraordinary disaster. It will go down in history as one of the greatest failures of American leadership.”
Rogers’ statement kicked off the second day of Capitol Hill testimony on the Afghanistan fiasco from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of US Central Command. The highlights included:
Austin and McKenzie revealing that they knew within hours of an Aug. 29 US drone strike in Kabul that civilians had been killed, although it took nearly three weeks to emerge that 10 people — including seven children and a US-linked aid worker — had died in the blast.
McKenzie confirming that the Taliban had offered to give the United States responsibility for security in Kabul during the final weeks of the withdrawal — and saying he turned it down, in part because “we did not have the resources.”
Austin blaming the State Department for not starting evacuations of American citizens, green-card holders and Afghan allies earlier, and saying the Pentagon would have liked to see the withdrawal “go faster or sooner.”
During his opening statement Wednesday, Austin said the US government must “consider some uncomfortable truths about why the Afghanistan
mission failed,” claiming, “We did not fully comprehend the depth of
corruption and poor leadership” in the Afghan military.
Nor, Austin said, did
America “grasp that there was only so much for which and for whom many of the Afghan forces would fight.”
“We provided the Afghan military with equipment and aircraft and the skills to use them, and over the years, they often fought bravely,” he said. “Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers and police officers died. But in the end, we couldn’t provide them with the will to win — at least not all of them. And as a veteran of that war, I am personally reckoning with all of that.”
Meanwhile, McKenzie revealed that Taliban political leader Abdul Ghani Baradar had offered to let the US take charge of security in the Afghan capital in the final weeks of the evacuation. The commander said he did not pursue the idea because “that was not why I was there, that was not my instruction, and we did not have the resources to undertake that mission.” McKenzie added that he did not know if Baradar’s offer was conveyed to Biden. Over the final two weeks of the war in Afghanistan, US forces were confined to the Kabul airport — where 13 service members were killed in a suicide bombing while processing Afghans for evacuation flights. Wednesday’s hearing came one day after Milley, the top US military officer, acknowledged during a tense, six-hour Senate hearing that Biden had been advised to leave at least 2,500 troops behind to prevent a rapid Taliban takeover — advice the president ignored before claiming in an Aug. 18 ABC News interview that no one had made the suggestion to him “that I can recall.”
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) pressed McKenzie on Biden’s ABC comments, saying, “Either the president lied to the American people, or he legitimately cannot remember the counsel of his top military advisers in winding down the longest war in American history, or you have not been fully accurate under oath.”
McKenzie declined to detail his advice to Biden, but reiterated that “it has been my consistent position throughout this hearing and the hearing yesterday that I believed the appropriate level of our forces in Afghanistan should have been 2,500.”
Milley refused to pin blame for the “strategic failure” of Afghanistan on Biden, saying he was “not going to judge a president; that’s the job of the American people” and citing a “cumulative effect to a series of strategic decisions” over 20 years that led to the chaos.
McKenzie also reiterated that he took “full responsibility” for the Aug. 29 drone strike.
Under questioning from Rep. Trent Kelly (R-Miss.), McKenzie acknowledged that CENTCOM knew “within four or five hours after the strike occurred” that civilians had died, but claimed that it did not know that “the target of the strike was, in fact, an error — a mistake, until some time later. It took us several days to run that down.”
When Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) asked Austin why the removal of Americans and visa holders and applicants did not begin sooner, the defense secretary claimed that “the call on how to do that and when to do it is really a State Department call.”