The top U.S. general in Afghanistan during the 2021 U.S. withdrawal said he repeatedly warned the Trump and Biden administrations that withdrawing all troops would make the security situation in the country “very bad, very fast,” but officials failed to understand the danger.
Retired Army Gen. Austin Scott Miller, former commander of U.S. Forces Afghanistan, said he advised both administrations that reducing troop presence to zero would have left the U.S.-backed Afghan Security Forces vulnerable to being invaded by the Taliban, according to his April 15 interview. with the Chamber’s Foreign Relations Committee,released Monday.
“My opinion was that going to zero things would go very bad, very quickly,” Miller said in the closed-door testimony. “It is clear, [I] define it [as] If we are not prepared for a political or security collapse while we are still present, we simply will not be prepared.”
Instead, Miller recommended that the US maintain at least 2,500 forces on the ground at bases in Kabul and at Bagram Airfield – once the largest US military base in the country that was abandoned by the US military in July 2021 , a month before the fall of Kabul and the total evacuation of the USA.
“My recommendation was that we maintain a footprint,” Miller said. “You leave something here that keeps the Afghan Security Forces in the fight, keeps the Afghan Air Force in the fight and moves forward. So that was my recommendation and it remained consistent.”
Still, both President Trump and President Biden have taken steps to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan, with Trump initiating the withdrawal through a February 2020 agreement with the Taliban known as the Doha Agreement, and Biden ultimately completing the effort in August 2021, with disastrous results.
In the chaos of the exit, during which tens of thousands of Afghan civilians desperately tried to leave the country through Hamid Karzai International Airport, an ISIS-K suicide bomber blew himself up outside the airport’s Abbey Gate, killing 13 military personnel. from the USA and almost 200 Afghans.
Miller said that after the Doha Agreement, the Taliban launched several indirect fire attacks, which he considered a warning of what was to come.
But in April 2021, after Biden announced his decision to fully withdraw US troops and diplomats from Afghanistan, Miller said he anticipated a full Taliban takeover of the country.
Although he later tried to argue for the evacuation of the US Embassy in Kabul, State Department officials appeared to have a “lack of understanding of the risk.”
Miller said he became so concerned about the government’s failure to understand how dangerous the withdrawal would be that he alerted the Marine Corps commander in charge of planning a possible evacuation to prepare for “some really adverse conditions.”
After Kabul quickly fell to the Taliban in August 2021, the State Department finally requested a non-combatant evacuation operation for its employees, but “it was too late,” a situation that put US troops in a position tense, Miller said.
“If the building is already on fire before you start to evacuate it, it will be a much more challenging evacuation,” he told lawmakers.
“At that point, my focus was: How do I get these guys out of here without hurting anyone?” He continued. “I usually don’t get scared. I am not. I was scared. And do you know what I was afraid of? I was scared of losing someone.”
Miller also lamented that he “did not foresee a good future for Afghanistan when I was leaving” and that he tried to ensure that authorities had a good understanding of what was happening in Afghanistan.
The interview will likely recharge critics of Biden’s foreign policy decisions ahead of November’s presidential election, with House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) leading the investigation into the Afghanistan withdrawal.
The administration and its supporters, however, criticized McCaul’s investigation for ignoring important decisions made by Trump while he was in the White House — including the Doha Agreement, an agreement that imposed a May 2021 deadline for a full military withdrawal from the United States. USA that left Biden with little control and no plan for how to achieve it.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
