Afghanistan

withdrawal agreements negotiated by former President Donald Trump and blamed the military, saying top commanders said they had enough resources to handle the evacuation.

Thirteen U.S. service members were killed by a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate in the final days of the war, as the Taliban took over Afghanistan.

Thousands of panicked Afghans and U.S. citizens desperately tried to get on U.S. military flights that were airlifting people out. In the end the military was able to rescue more than 130,000 civilians before the final U.S. military aircraft departed.

That chaos was the end result of the State Department failing to call for an evacuation of U.S. personnel until it was too late, both former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command retired Gen. Frank Mckenzie told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“On 14 August the noncombatant evacuation operation decision was made by the Department of State and the U.S. military alerted, marshalled, mobilized and rapidly deployed faster than any military in the world could ever do,” Milley said.

But the State Department’s

decision came too late, Milley said.

“The fundamental mistake, the fundamental flaw was the timing of the State Department,” Milley said. “That was too slow and too late.”

Evacuation orders must come from the State Department, but in the weeks and months before Kabul

fell to the Taliban, the Pentagon was pressing the State Department for evacuation plans and was concerned that State was not ready, Mckenzie said.

“We had forces in the region as early as 9 July, but we could do nothing,” Mckenzie said, calling State’s timing “the fatal flaw that created what

happened in August.”

“I believe the events of mid- and late August 2021 were the direct result of delaying the initiation of the (evacuation) for several months, in fact until we were in extremis and the Taliban had overrun the country,” Mckenzie said.

Milley was the nation’s top-ranking military officer

at the time, and had urged Biden to keep a residual force of 2,500 forces there to give Afghanistan’s special forces enough backup to keep the Taliban at bay and allow the U.S. military to hold on to Bagram Air Base, which could have provided the military additional options to respond to Taliban attacks.

Biden did not approve the larger residual force, opting to keep a smaller force of 650 that would be limited to securing the U.S. embassy. That smaller force was not adequate to keeping Bagram, which was quickly taken over by the Taliban.

The Taliban have controlled Afghanistan since the U.S. departure, resulting in many dramatic changes for the population, including the near-total loss of rights for women and girls.

The White House found last year that the chaotic withdrawal occurred because Biden was “constrained” by previous agreements made by President Donald Trump to withdraw forces.

That 2023 internal review further appeared to shift any blame in the Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport, saying it was the U.S. military that made one possibly key decision.

“To manage the potential threat of a terrorist attack, the President repeatedly asked whether the military required additional support to carry out their mission at HKIA,” the 2023 report said, adding, “Senior military officials confirmed that they had sufficient resources and authorities to mitigate threats.”

A message left with the State Department was not immediately returned on Tuesday.

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Retired Gen. Mark Milley, left, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired Gen. Kenneth Mckenzie, the former commander of the U.S. Central Command, appear during a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the Capitol in Washington on Tuesday about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.