The top two generals who oversaw the deadly evacuation of Afghanistan faced renewed scrutiny Wednesday as House Republicans escalated their campaign to hold President Biden accountable for the fiasco and Democrats accused Donald Trump of setting the conditions for the Kabul government’s collapse.
Retired Gens. Mark A. Milley and Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, career military officers who served in senior roles under both presidents, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee as part of its oversight investigation. Both men, appearing in dark suits and ties after departing military life, said that while the military had built a plan to withdraw all U.S. troops, diplomats, citizens, and at-risk Afghanistan in 2021, Biden instead decided to leave open the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and withdraw the military, setting conditions for security to crumble with Americans still in harm’s way.
“As you are aware, the decision to begin a NEO rests with the Department of State, not the Department of Defense,” McKenzie said, using an acronym for noncombatant evacuation operation. “But we could do nothing, nothing to commence the operation — the evacuation — until a NEO was declared.”
The recurring spotlight on the withdrawal, marked by its scenes of violence and desperation, puts Democrats in an uncomfortable election-year position. Many Democratic lawmakers joined their Republican colleagues in criticizing the administration’s chaotic handling of the withdrawal in 2021. But with a potentially treacherous reelection battle for Biden against Trump now months away, Democrats are under pressure to show unity in rallying around Biden, who has defended his decision-making and blamed Trump for boxing him in by signing a deal with the Taliban in 2020 that agreed to withdraw troops with few conditions.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the committee chairman, said at the outset of the hearing that the White House “refused” to listen to warnings about what was happening on the ground. The State Department, McCaul said, did not call for a full evacuation until Aug. 14, 2021, one day before the Afghan government fled the country as the Taliban swept into the capital city and thousands of civilians overran the international airport in Kabul while desperate for a way out of the country.
“As the saying goes, ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,’” McCaul said of the Biden administration. “And fail they did.”
Both retired generals said their remarks were consistent with hours of earlier testimony they provided under oath while still on active duty — a point that Rep. Gregory Meeks (N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, sought to highlight. Meeks said that lawmakers need to refocus on “the entire 20 years of being in Afghanistan.”
“There’s nothing groundbreaking here!” Meeks said.
McCaul has declined to relent. On Wednesday, he said that he has sought to compel the testimony of two top military officers on the ground, Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue and Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, and so far has been unsuccessful. Military personnel would have been “much better prepared to conduct a more orderly” evacuation, Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, the top U.S. commander in Kabul during the operation, previously told Army investigators, “if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground.”
Biden administration officials have fiercely disputed those characterizations, saying that while early parts of the evacuation were difficult, the U.S. government eventually stabilized security well enough to airlift 124,000 people from harm’s way. That was made possible in part by McKenzie, the former head of U.S. Central Command, striking a deal with the Taliban in which the militants would provide security outside the international airport in Kabul while U.S. forces manned the airfield’s perimeter.
Among those present at the hearing were the parents of several U.S. troops killed on Aug. 24, 2021, in a bombing on the outskirts of the Kabul airport. The explosion came after days of warnings that the Islamic State was poised to attack, and killed 13 U.S. troops and about a 170 Afghans in a tightly packed outdoor corridor. Dozens more were wounded.
Milley and McKenzie both offered condolences to the families, some of whom have aimed their fury squarely at the Biden administration. Milley said that he will do everything in his power to make sure the families have answers to their questions.
“They know my feelings for them,” he said. “They know that there are no words by me, or any general, or any politician, or anyone that can ever bring back their fallen.”
U.S. troops who survived the blast said they also came under gunfire, but U.S. military investigators found that the loss of life was linked to the single explosion. Military officials later agreed to review those findings and conduct additional witness interviews. The results are expected to be made public soon.