The State Department slow-walked the order to evacuate Afghanistan, potentially resulting in the chaos seen during the United States’s 2021 withdrawal, according to the nation’s former top general.
Retired Gen. Mark Milley, who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the withdrawal, said that the State Department did not issue the plan to evacuate Afghanistan until mid-August, a whole month after he warned the country could collapse into civil war.
“It is my assessment that that decision came too late,” Mr. Milley told the House Armed Services Committee on March 19.
Though much public attention has focused on the military’s preparation and conduct during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the order to withdraw and oversee that operation is legally the responsibility of the State Department, to whom the military provides support.
Committee Chair Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said the State Department went so far as to prohibit its employees from using the term “emergency evacuation” during the tense weeks leading up to the nation’s scramble out of the country.
It was his opinion that such a decision was made to shield the Biden administration’s reputation and policy positions.
Mr. Milley said that he had made clear a month prior to the evacuation order that the situation was untenable but could not engage in the withdrawal operation until the State Department issued the order.
“Without this support, it was my view at the time, it was a matter of when and not if the Afghan government would collapse and the Tiablian would take control,” he said.
“My analysis, my personal analysis, was that an accelerated withdrawal would likely lead to the general collapse of the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government resulting in a large-scale civil war reminiscent of the 1990s, or a complete Taliban takeover.”
At the time, Mr. Milley and other military leaders recommended maintaining a minimum force of 2,500 troops on the ground despite the mandatory drawdown and withdrawal of troops begun under the Trump administration with the signing of the Doha Agreement.
There was no reason to adhere to the agreement, he suggested, because the Taliban flagrantly violated nearly every term.
“The Taliban violated every condition of the agreement except lethal attacks on U.S. forces from the time they signed the agreement all the way to the end,” Mr. Milley said.
In all, Mr. Milley called the U.S. withdrawal a “strategic failure” and said that U.S. attempts to establish a free Afghan nation had crumbled.
“At the end of 20 years, we, the military, helped build an army and state, but we could not forge a nation,” he added.
Retired Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, who served as the commander of U.S. Central Command at the time, similarly said that he was “concerned by the middle of July” about the lack of a formal evacuation order and made representations to the secretary of defense to that end.
Mr. McKenzie said the Pentagon “struggled” with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in accessing the evacuation plan.
“They had a plan,” he said.
“But it’s one thing to have the plan, and it’s a second thing to do the actual coordination of a plan, to talk about the specifics of execution.”
To that end, Mr. McKenzi said that policy decisions “created the environment of August 2021.”
He continued: “If there is fault, it lies in a policy decision that placed the joint force in this situation and exposed the force over time to the possibility of these kinds of attacks.
“It was my judgment that it was far too little, far too late.”
