Former generals blame Biden for chaotic Afghan exit

WASHINGTON — The top two US generals who oversaw the evacuation of Afghanistan in August 2021 blamed the administration of US President Joe Biden for the chaotic departure, telling lawmakers on Tuesday that it was inadequately planned and not ordered in time.

The rare testimony by Mark Milley, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Frank McKenzie, former commander of the US central command, publicly exposed for the first time the strain and differences the military leaders had with the Biden administration in the final days of the conflict.

Key differences included that the military had advised the US to keep at least 2,500 service members in Afghanistan to maintain stability and a concern that the State Department was not moving fast enough to get an evacuation started.

The remarks also contrasted with an internal White House review of the administration's decisions which found that Biden's decisions had been "severely constrained" by previous withdrawal agreements negotiated by former president Donald Trump and blamed the military, saying top commanders said they had enough resources to handle the evacuation.

Thousands of panicked Afghans and US citizens desperately tried to board US military flights that were airlifting people out. In the end the military was able to rescue more than 130,000 civilians before the final US military aircraft departed.

That chaos was the end result of the State Department failing to call for an evacuation of US personnel until it was too late, Milley and McKenzie told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

"On Aug 14 the noncombatant evacuation operation decision was made by the Department of State," Milley said. But the State Department's decision came too late, he added.

"The fundamental mistake, the fundamental flaw was the timing of the State Department," Milley said. "That was too slow and too late."

In a lengthy statement late on Tuesday, the National Security Council took issue with the generals' remarks, saying that Biden's hard decision was the right thing to do.

In the hearing, which was prompted by a lengthy investigation by the House Foreign Affairs Committee into the decisions surrounding the evacuation of Kabul, McKenzie spoke at length about his discomfort with how little seemed to be ready for an evacuation, even raising those concerns with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Agencies via Xinhua