Top Pentagon brass blamed the lightning-quick Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and botched U.S. withdrawal on bad intelligence during sometimes intense grilling on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
The questioning, a month after the U.S. military’s departure from Kabul, focused on the catastrophic failure of the U.S.-trained Afghan army, a humiliating withdrawal that left hundreds of Americans behind, a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members, and a drone strike that killed an aid worker and seven children.
“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,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It would be dishonest to claim otherwise.”
In addition to Austin, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, all faced questions from the panel, which included Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican who is an Army veteran and harsh critic of the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal.
“We absolutely missed the rapid, 11-day collapse of the Afghan military and the Afghan government,” Milley said.
“General Milley, why haven’t you resigned?” Cotton asked at one point, prompting a defiant Milley to reply that quitting would be turning his back on the men and women who serve under him.
Despite two decades of working in Afghanistan and training its military and an Office of Inspector General’s report that painted a prescient picture, Austin said the United States overestimated the fighting ability of Afghan soldiers and did not anticipate the “snowball effect” of Taliban commanders striking deals with local leaders.
All three traced much of the failure to the U.S. not understanding the impact a “peace deal” between the U.S. and the Taliban, which excluded the Afghan government, had on the morale of the Afghan forces as the Taliban ramped up operations.
The February 2020 agreement in Doha was signed by the U.S. and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now the Taliban’s deputy prime minister. The pact included an agreement for the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners and up to 1,000 prisoners held by the Taliban. At the time, the Afghan government fiercely protested its exclusion from the negotiations.
Under the agreement, the U.S. committed to pulling out all military forces within 14 months, while the Taliban pledged to bar terrorists such as al Qaeda from launching attacks on the U.S. from Afghanistan.
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“While the Taliban did not attack U.S. forces, which was one of the conditions, it failed to fully honor any — any — other commitments under the Doha Agreement,” Milley testified.
Yet the Trump and Biden administrations continued with the U.S. withdrawal.
Milley told lawmakers that although U.S. spy agencies advised that Afghan forces were “at risk of fracture,” intelligence consensus was that the Taliban would retake all provincial capitals other than Kabul by early to late fall.
“There were no estimates that I am aware of that predicted the collapse of the Afghan army and the government in 11 days in August,” he said.
A report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in late July warned, “The news coming out of Afghanistan this quarter has been bleak. … The overall trend is clearly unfavorable to the Afghan government, which could face an existential crisis if it isn’t addressed and reversed.”
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Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who is the ranking member on the committee, told the military leaders that the disastrous withdrawal was predictable — and avoidable.
“We saw it coming,” Inhofe said, adding that the Biden administration “failed to anticipate what all of us knew would happen.”
