Top US generals told lawmakers at a congressional hearing that America lost the Afghanistan war which it had been caused by miscalculations spanning several administrations and therefore the August collapse of the erstwhile government in Kabul might be traced to the 2020 agreement with the Taliban.
“It wasn’t lost within the last 20 days or maybe 20 months. There’s a cumulative effect to a series of strategic decisions that go way back,” chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of staff General Mark Milley told the armed services committee of the House of Representatives, on Wednesday Strategically, the war is lost – the enemy is in Kabul,” he visited say, pertaining to the Taliban taking power in Kabul General Milley cited several reasons that he said needed to be checked out like the choice to shift forces from Afghanistan for the war in Iraq and therefore the failure to “effectively affect Pakistan”, where many of figures sought by US-led coalition forces sound shelter.
General Milley had spoken of the Pakistan’s sanctuaries also at an Afghanistan hearing within the United States Senate , and involved a requirement to review Islamabad’s behaviour. Secretary of state Antony Blinken had earlier said ties with Pakistan were under review due to its duplicitous role in Afghanistan, where, he added, it had been “hedging its bets General Frank McKenzie, the top of the US Central Command that ran the war in Afghanistan, told lawmakers that the rapid collapse of President Ashraf Ghani’s government in Kabul, which had caught the US completely unprepared, might be traced to the agreement that the Trump administration had signed with the Taliban in Doha in February 2020.
“The signing of the Doha agreement had a very pernicious effect on the govt of Afghanistan and on its military – psychological quite anything , but we set a date certain for once we were getting to leave and once they could expect all assistance to finish ,” General McKenzie said The Trump administration had kept the Ashraf Ghani government completely out of the agreement, which had set a timeline for the US and international forces to go away Afghanistan by May Day of 2021, supported some conditions, which the generals also told the lawmakers, were largely not unfulfilled with one exception that the Taliban won’t attack US or coalition forces.
Defence secretary Lloyd Austin testified alongside Milley and Mckenzie and usually agreed with the generals’ assessments of the way the Afghanistan war unfolded over 20 days and the way it ended. The three officials had earlier told the United States Senate that that they had recommended to the president that the US should retain 2,5000 personnel in Afghanistan, contradicting Biden, who had claimed he didn’t get that advice.
Mckenzie further said that cutting troops to below 2,500 “was the opposite , sort of, nail within the coffin”. “It has been my position in my judgement, that if we went below an advisory level of two ,500, i think that the govt of Afghanistan would likely collapse which the military would follow; one might go before the opposite but i think that was getting to be the inevitable results of drawing right down to zero and I’ve expressed that opinion writing for quite while now,” said the highest US general for the Afghanistan war.