After Gen. Mark Milley’s testimony in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson unloaded on him and President Joe Biden’s blunders.
Carlson called Milley “dishonest, incompetent, partisan and dishonorable” in his opening statement on Tuesday Night’s primetime show “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
And that was just the beginning.
Critics pointed to the testimony of Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as evidence that Biden had been untruthful when, in a television interview last month, he suggested the military had not urged him to keep troops in Afghanistan.
Carlson’s criticism on his popular late night opinion show rang the loudest.
“Joe Biden’s foreign policy is a legitimate disaster,” Carlson said. “Mark Milley wants you to know that none of it is his fault. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin wants you to know that too. So does the head of Central Command, General McKenzie.”
“All three of them want to make it crystal clear that the senile guy in the White House did this,” the Fox News star continued. “It’s his fault, not theirs. It was Joe Biden, they told us today, who forced American troops to leave Afghanistan before we evacuated all American citizens.”
During the hearing, the top U.S. military officer called the 20-year war in Afghanistan a “strategic failure” and acknowledged to Congress that he had favored keeping several thousand troops in the country to prevent a collapse of the U.S.-supported Kabul government and a rapid takeover by the Taliban.
Milley refused to say what advice he gave Biden last spring when Biden was considering whether to comply with an agreement the Trump administration had made with the Taliban to reduce the American troop presence to zero by May 2021, ending a U.S. war that began in October 2001. Testifying alongside Milley, Austin also refused to reveal his advice to Biden.
Austin and Milley are scheduled to appear Wednesday before the House Armed Services Committee to review the war.
Milley told the Senate committee, when pressed Tuesday, that it had been his personal opinion that at least 2,500 U.S. troops were needed to guard against a collapse of the Kabul government and a return to Taliban rule.
Defying Biden’s assurances, the Afghan government and its U.S.-trained army collapsed within days in mid-August, allowing the Taliban, which had ruled the country from 1996 to 2001, to capture Kabul with what Milley described as a couple of hundred men on motorcycles, without a shot being fired. That triggered a frantic U.S. effort to evacuate American civilians, Afghan allies, and others from Kabul airport.
Gen. Frank McKenzie, who as head of Central Command was overseeing U.S. troops in Afghanistan, said he shared Milley’s view that keeping a residual force there could have kept the Kabul government intact.
“I recommended that we maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, and I also recommended early in the fall of 2020 that we maintain 4,500 at that time, those were my personal views,” McKenzie said. “I also had a view that the withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and eventually the Afghan government.”
The hearing at times was contentious, as Republicans sought to portray Biden as having ignored advice from military officers and mischaracterized the military options he was presented last spring and summer.
Several Republicans tried to draw Milley, McKenzie, and Austin into commenting on the truthfulness of Biden’s statement to ABC News on Aug. 18, three days after the Taliban took control of Kabul, that no senior military commander had recommended against a full troop withdrawal when it was under discussion in the first months of Biden’s term.
When asked in that interview whether military advisers had recommended keeping 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, Biden replied, “No. No one said that to me that I can recall.” He also said the advice “was split.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that Biden was referring to having received a range of advice.
“Regardless of the advice, it’s his decision, he’s the commander in chief,” she said.
In a blunt assessment of a war that cost 2,461 American lives, Milley said the result was years in the making.
“Outcomes in a war like this, an outcome that is a strategic failure — the enemy is in charge in Kabul, there’s no way else to describe that — that is a cumulative effect of 20 years,” he said, adding that lessons need to be learned, including whether the U.S. military made the Afghans overly dependent on American technology in a mistaken effort to make the Afghan army look like the American army.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas asked Milley why he did not choose to resign after his advice was rejected.
Milley, who was appointed to his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by President Donald Trump and retained by Biden, said it was his responsibility to provide the commander in chief with his best advice.
“The president doesn’t have to agree with that advice,” Milley said. “He doesn’t have to make those decisions just because we are generals. And it would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to resign just because my advice was not taken.”
Austin defended the military’s execution of a frantic airlift from Kabul in August and asserted it will be “difficult but absolutely possible” to contain future threats from Afghanistan without troops on the ground.
Milley cited “a very real possibility” that al-Qaida or the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate could reconstitute in Afghanistan under Taliban rule and present a terrorist threat to the United States in the next 12 to 36 months.
It was al-Qaida’s use of Afghanistan as a base from which to plan and execute its attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, that triggered the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan a month later.
“And we must remember that the Taliban was and remains a terrorist organization and they still have not broken ties with al-Qaida,” Milley said. “I have no illusions who we are dealing with. It remains to be seen whether or not the Taliban can consolidate power or if the country will further fracture into civil war.”
Austin questioned decisions made over the 20-year course of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. In retrospect, he said, the American government may have put too much faith in its ability to build a viable Afghan government.
“We helped build a state, but we could not forge a nation,” he told the Senate committee. “The fact that the Afghan army we and our partners trained simply melted away – in many cases without firing a shot – took us all by surprise. It would be dishonest to claim otherwise.”
Asked why the Biden administration did not foresee the rapid collapse of the Afghan army, Milley said that in his judgment the U.S. military lost its ability to see and understand the true condition of the Afghan forces when it ended the practice some years ago of having advisers alongside the Afghans on the battlefield.
“You can’t measure the human heart with a machine, you have to be there,” Milley said.
Carlson was not convinced.
“So the generals claim they told Biden the Afghanistan withdrawal would be a total disaster,” he said. “Biden claims they didn’t tell him that. The question is: Who’s lying? Someone’s lying.”
“Biden himself has no idea. He doesn’t know who’s lying. He doesn’t know what he had for lunch,” Carlson continued in his fiery segment. “All we know for sure — and this is the main point — is that no one in Pentagon leadership will ever be held accountable for this, the latest in a very long string of colossal screw-ups that have dramatically reduced American power and prestige and gotten a bunch of people killed.”
“No one.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article