In a report just out, General Milley blamed the State Department for the withdrawal disaster in Afghanistan in a classified briefing with Senators yesterday:
AXIOS – In a classified briefing with senators on Tuesday, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley directly blamed the State Department for a botched evacuation from Afghanistan, saying officials “waited too long” to order the operation out of Kabul’s airport, two sources with direct knowledge of the briefing told Axios.
Those private remarks were far more blunt than Milley’s public testimony, in which the nation’s top general said the issue of whether the order should have been given earlier is an “open question that needs further exploration.”
The testimony could renew scrutiny into Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s performance.
During a closed session after Tuesday’s public testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) directed a general question to Austin about lessons learned from the withdrawal.
Milley jumped in to say that the evacuation of civilians — which Duckworth had not specifically asked about — needed to happen earlier.
The top U.S. general acknowledged that there’s often disagreement between the State Department and Pentagon in general, but that it was particularly pronounced in this instance.
A third source, defending Milley, said the general “wasn’t blaming anybody per se, but was speaking from a purely military perspective. The quicker we moved out non-combatants, the safer they would be.”
While they all refused to resign in protest of these horrible decisions, it seems to me these generals are making sure that they aren’t the ones to blame by making clear that they told Biden what he should do and that he chose to ignore them.
I’m not saying they are wrong about what they say they advised Biden, because clearly Biden is the main reason this disaster happened in the first place. But as Gaetz deftly pointed out this morning, Milley himself is on the record saying they didn’t realize Afghan forces would fall to the Taliban as quickly as they did and that’s clearly something they should have seen coming.
In regards to Milley’s comments about the state department, I think that’s probably true and strongly suspect Blinken was probably working directly with Biden on all of this.