(FreedomBeacon.com)- A few months ago while testifying in the Senate, US CENTCOM commander, General Kenneth McKenzie, described the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan as “a mistake.”
Despite that admission, last week, the Biden administration marked the first anniversary of the withdrawal by reaffirming its claim that the president made the right decision.
In a White House memo, the administration doubled down on the withdrawal despite widespread condemnation and criticism from around the world, arguing that the president “refused to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended long ago.”
Of course, this doesn’t address the bulk of the criticism leveled against the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, which was largely over how the withdrawal was conducted rather than whether or not withdrawing troops was a good idea.
Most people wanted America’s 20-year quagmire to end. But the manner in which it was done led to long-term disastrous consequences, not to mention the death of 13 US service members in a suicide bombing.
National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson wrote in the memo that bringing US troops home from Afghanistan “strengthened our national security by better positioning us to confront the challenges of the future and put the United States in a stronger place to lead the world.”
Adrienne must live in a dream world.
If anything the bungled withdrawal damaged America’s standing in the world. It emboldened both Russia and China who see America as weak and feckless.
The military’s postmortem on the Afghanistan withdrawal put to rest the administration’s claim that nobody could have predicted the Afghan government would fall so quickly to the Taliban.
General McKenzie told the senators on the Armed Services Committee that it had been a mistake to reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 in the spring of 2021.
McKenzie told the senators that at the time, “we expected the government of Afghanistan to collapse” if the troop level dropped below 2,500. He added that both he and General Miller expressed that opinion at the time.
And while he is confident the concerns were heard, at the end of the day, the decisions about troop levels or whether to withdraw are “made at the highest level” of the government and not by the military.
And in this case, the decision was ultimately made by Joe Biden.
