Retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, who oversaw the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan as commander of U.S. Central Command, placed blame on both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump for how the war ended in an interview on Sunday.
McKenzie made the comments in a wide-ranging discussion with defense journalist Jennifer Griffin on Fox News Sunday about the end to the nation’s longest war and the fallout from it. McKenzie, who retired in April after 42 years of service, was asked about Biden and Trump individually. He reiterated that he opposed a complete military exit from the failed state, arguing that the decision to eliminate all troop presence was largely responsible for what went wrong in the chaotic withdrawal.
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“Subsequently, after we made the decision to go to zero, the decision to try to maintain an embassy platform until far too late contributed also to what happened in August,” McKenzie said. “Those are, I think, two of the big decisions that led us to the events that you just described.”
Asked if Trump’s Doha agreement, the U.S.-Taliban withdrawal deal, was responsible for the collapse of the Afghan government, McKenzie offered his most pointed criticism of both commanders in chief.
“The president of the United States owns the final responsibility for these actions. I believe we had two presidents of the United States that wanted to exit Afghanistan, and they might not have had anything else in common, but they shared that common view,” he said. “So we had a continuity of objective across two administrations that really allowed the events that occurred to occur in the manner that they did.”
McKenzie was also pressed about Biden’s claims ahead of the chaos in August, specifically the president’s assertion that al Qaeda was “gone” and that “the Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army. They’re not. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s gonna be no circumstance where you’re gonna see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
Asked about the latter quote, which Biden said in July, McKenzie replied: “What happened in August was not preordained. It was not set in the stars. We made a series of decisions that took us to that point in August. The basic decision was the decision to withdraw completely from Afghanistan.”
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Responding to Biden’s other comment about al Qaeda, the former CENTCOM chief said: “Well, our position has always been that al Qaeda is there because the Taliban hosts them. That’s why we went to Afghanistan in the first place, and certainly, al Qaeda’s been rocked back on their heels in recent years. But al Qaeda is still present in Afghanistan, and also, ISIS is still present in Afghanistan.”
“Both of those entities have a long-term aspirational goal to attack us in our homeland,” he continued. “And given the breathing room to reestablish themselves and reassert their strength, we believe they will do that.”
