Washington:
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress on Tuesday that the Afghan army’s sudden collapse caught the Pentagon off-guard as he acknowledged miscalculations in America’s longest war such as corruption and broken morale in Afghan ranks.
“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,” Mr Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It would be dishonest to claim otherwise.”
Mr Austin was speaking at the start off of two days of what are anticipated to be some of the most contentious hearings in memory more than the chaotic finish to the war in Afghanistan, which expense the lives of US troops and civilians and left the Taliban back in energy. The Senate and House committees overseeing the US military are holding hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, exactly where Republicans are hoping to zero in on what they see as errors that President Joe Biden’s administration made toward the finish of the two-decade-old war. It follows related questioning two weeks ago that saw US Secretary of State Antony Blinken staunchly defending the administration, even as he faced calls for his resignation. Mr Austin praised American personnel who helped airlift 124,000 Afghans out of the nation, an operation that also expense the lives of 13 US troops and scores of Afghans in a suicide bombing outdoors the Kabul airport.
“Was it perfect? Of course not,” Mr Austin mentioned, noting the desperate Afghans who killed attempting to climb the side of a US military aircraft or the civilians killed in the last US drone strike of the war. Senator James Inhofe, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s major Republican, squarely blamed the Biden administration for what critics say was a shameful finish to a 20-year endeavour.
Mr Inhofe mentioned Mr Biden ignored the suggestions of his military leaders and left quite a few Americans behind soon after the US
withdrawal.
“We all witnessed the horror of the president’s own making,” Mr Inhofe mentioned of Afghanistan. Many of the hardest concerns may well fall to the two senior US military commanders testifying: Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Marine General Frank McKenzie, head of US
Central Command.
()