Poli Alert Political & Civics
Related Articles
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday during a Senate hearing that the Afghan war was a “strategic failure” with the Taliban now being back in power and U.S. withdrawal from the country.
Milley, alongside Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and U.S. Central Command head Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, testified for the first time before Congress since the United States ended its longest war in Afghanistan.
“It is obvious, the war in Afghanistan did not end on the terms we wanted, with the Taliban now in power in Kabul,” Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“Strategically, the war is lost; the enemy is in Kabul. So you have a strategic failure while you simultaneously have an operational and tactical success,” he said, referring to the massive personnel evacuation since mid-August.
Milley and McKenzie said they believed the United States should have maintained 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, and a quick drawdown from the country could lead to a collapse of the Afghan government and military.
Milley and Pentagon chief Austin stressed that the sudden collapse of the Afghan military was beyond their expectation.
“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,” said Austin.
Milley noted that most intelligence assessments indicated the collapse “would occur late fall, perhaps early winter, Kabul might hold till next spring.”
Top military commanders pointed to the agreement reached between the United States and Taliban in February 2020, which called for a full withdrawal of the U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 2021, if the Taliban meets the conditions, had a demoralizing impact on the Afghan military.
The U.S. military completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan on Aug. 30 under Biden’s order, ending 20 years of occupation. The hasty and chaotic evacuations drew fierce criticism from both home and abroad.
