Military brass on defense as Senate Afghanistan hearing kicks off

The Pentagon’s top brass were on the defensive early Tuesday as the Senate Armed Services Committee kicked off its highly anticipated hearing on President Biden‘s troubled withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Anticipating tough questions from lawmakers on the panel, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin assured that the military remained in lockstep with Mr. Biden and had begun preparing for the withdrawal well in advance â€" even as he acknowledged that the Pentagon‘s leadership originally opposed the White House’s mandated Sept. 11 withdrawal deadline.

“We wanted to be ready. And we were,” Mr. Austin said in his opening remarks, pushing back on the widely held perception that the Biden administration was caught flat-footed as the Taliban swept Kabul in less than two weeks in late August.

SEE ALSO: Gen. Milley defends calls to Chinese: ‘I was certain’ Trump wouldn’t order attack

“To be clear, those first two days were difficult,” he said. “We all watched with alarm the images of Afghans rushing the runway and our aircraft. We all remember the scenes of confusion outside the airport. But within 48 hours, our troops restored order, and the process began to take hold.”

Having skirted congressional hearings on Afghanistan earlier this month, Mr. Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley, and head of U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie appeared before the panel in what’s expected to be a lengthy, heated hearing focused heavily on the Biden administration’s military missteps before and during the chaotic withdrawal, and the limitations that now face the Pentagon as it crafts a counterterrorism strategy without the benefit of having assets on the ground in Afghanistan. 

A second grilling before the House Armed Services Committee is set for Wednesday.

Although the military has escaped much of the political vitriol for the chaotic withdrawal, lawmakers have become increasingly critical of the Pentagon leadership. Some leading Republicans on Capitol Hill have called for both Mr. Austin and Gen. Milley to resign over their handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Those calls grew louder after disclosures in a book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa which included a claim that Gen. Milley was so worried about Mr. Trump’s mental state that he assembled top military leaders and advised them not to launch a nuclear strike â€" even if it was directly ordered by Mr. Trump â€" unless he was there. The authors also claimed that Gen. Milley effectively told China that the U.S. had no plans to attack in the fraught final days of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

The general has spoken little about those incidents, and in his opening remarks attempted to head off lawmakers’ questions and defend his actions. He said the calls to his Chinese counterpart were made with the “knowledge and coordination of civilian oversight,” and under Department of Defense guidance, and were made because of intelligence suggesting Beijing thought military action was looming.

“I’ve served this nation for 42 years,” he said. “I spent years in combat, and I buried a lot of my troops who died while defending this country. My loyalty for this nation, its people, and the Constitution hasn’t changed and will never change. As long as I have a breath to give. My loyalty is absolute.”

Both Mr. Austin and Gen. Milley’s remarks will likely do little to lighten the blows from lawmakers in the hearing.

Republican lawmakers, especially, have zeroed in on what they believe was a disconnect between Pentagon leadership and the president’s White House team. They questioned why Mr. Biden would have stuck by his original withdrawal plan, overruling his military advisers, amid mounting evidence that the U.S.-backed Afghan government was on the verge of a quick collapse and the Islamist Taliban ready to rapidly overrun the entire country.

The result: a quick collapse of the Kabul government, a hasty,chaotic evacuation highlighted by a deadly terrorist attack and the abandonment of U.S. supplies and weaponry, and the failure to secure safe passage out for a number of U.S. citizens and an even larger number of Afghans who aided the allied war effort and were in danger of being targeted by the Taliban.

“President Biden made a strategic decision to leave Afghanistan which resulted in the death of 13 U.S. service members, the deaths of hundreds of Afghan civilians, including women and children, and left American citizens surrounded by the very terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 â€" and they’re still there,” said Oklahoma Sen. James M. Inhofe, the Armed Services panel’s ranking Republican in his opening remarks.

“President Biden and his advisers didn’t listen to his combat commander,” he said. “He didn’t listen to Congress. And he failed to anticipate what all of us knew would happen. So in August, we all witnessed a horror of the president’s own making,” he said.

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