General milley calls Afghan's strategic failures as Trump's mistake that lead to Taliban's takeover

Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, right, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, left, will testify before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesda

“We need to consider some uncomfortable truths that we didn’t fully comprehend,” Secretary Austin told senators.

“The fact that the Afghan army, that we and our partners trained, simply melted away – in many cases without firing a shot – took us all by surprise and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise,” Austin said.

The Taliban entered Kabul on August 15 after a lightning-fast offensive across the country that saw little resistance from the Afghan forces the US had trained and supplied for years. The takeover prompted a large-scale evacuation of foreign citizens and vulnerable Afghans by several governments that was given a deadline of August 31 by the Taliban.

The comments of top US military officials, along with General Frank McKenzie, the head of Central Command who oversaw the withdrawal were the most extensive public comments from Pentagon leaders since the August 30 withdrawal.

“It is clear and obvious that the war in Afghanistan did not end on the terms we wanted with the Taliban now in power in Kabul,” General Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee, warning that Afghanistan today appears headed towards civil war.

Milley and McKenzie said they had warned that the Western-backed government in Kabul would fall if the US withdrew all troops.

“My analysis was that an accelerated withdrawal, without meeting specific and necessary conditions, risks losing the substantial gains made in Afghanistan, damaging US worldwide credibility and could precipitate a general collapse of the NSF and the Afghan government, resulting in a complete Taliban takeover, or general civil war,” Milley said.

Milley called it a “strategic failure”.

General McKenzie said he, too, had assessed Kabul would fall if the US withdrew.

“My view is that 2,500 was an appropriate number to remain and that if we went below that number, in fact, we would probably witness a collapse of the Afghan government and the Afghan military.”

A February 2020 deal reached by the administration of US President Donald Trump with the Taliban set May 1, 2021, as a date to fully withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan. The US pullout was supposed to be based on conditions fulfilled by the Taliban.