Congressional hearings show the mistakes on the final days of the US-Afghan strategic pullout.
Two days of congressional testimony by the Pentagon’s senior leadership lay bare the mistakes of the US’s final days in Kabul, and gave Republicans opportunities to pin the disaster on Joe Biden.
The hearings are important for what they revealed on the US’s futility in Afghanistan, and are convenient to judge the failures there by three previous presidents and the incumbent. But for many members of Congress, the real action is a complex tangle of pending budgetary legislation, together with yet other crises.
Prior to the hearings, there was speculation about how harshly Milley would be grilled for potentially embarrassing details about his telephone conversations with his Chinese counterpart. They discussed the possibility that then-president Donald Trump may provoke a military confrontation with China in the last days of his presidency.
By contrast, Democrats attempted to lead the conversation to the mishaps of the preceding two decades, then to Donald Trump’s ill-conceived accord with the Taliban in February 2020 and the constraints that agreement placed upon his successor.Republicans were eager to make Biden the only guilty party. He had withdrawn the remaining troops, didn’t keep a US presence at Bagram Airbase and caused the initial chaos at the evacuation airport.
Looking back over two days of testimony, it was the voice of Washington Post columnist-at-large, Robin Givhan, that seemed to find the right texture. She wrote: “…After 20 years, it’s hard to know who to believe about why things went so terribly wrong in Afghanistan. The military men had wanted to leave about 2,500 US troops on the ground. McKenzie and Milley had given President Biden their best advice.
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