And you’ve been especially critical of late when analyzing the disastrous withdrawal, which included the deaths of american soldiers from Afghanistan. What advice would you give the Congress? What would you have Congress ask as they sit there and make speeches for the television cameras under the guise of trying to find out what happened when we evacuated Afghanistan? Well, keep in mind that when President Trump gave the direction to me to find a way to get us out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible, the republican leadership of the Senate and, for that matter, of the House, all lined up against him.

Yet President Trump understood. I understood, and everyone who was involved understood that if you were going to leave Afghanistan, the time to do it was in the winter. November, December, January, February. That winter period was ideal for the purpose of disengaging from Afghanistan, not just to get equipment out, which was going to take time in any case, but to put an end to the military deployment there. Now, the second part of this is nobody thought through from where you would do this.

And the original idea was that you would do it from Bagram, not from Kabul. Now, the reason I’m saying all of that is because the worst of all possible circumstances were created when the decision was made to leave in the middle of the summer. Because the summer is the fighting season. That’s when everyone comes out of the mountains, out of the hills, and comes down to fight. That was a disaster in and of itself.

And unfortunately, I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what the backstory was, but I’m told that President Biden, for whatever reason, decided that he wanted us out before 911. But the truth is, it didn’t make sense tactically, operationally or strategically to leave in the summer. Your next best option was to wait once again for the winter, for the so called fighting season in Afghanistan to end. Now, having said all of that, there are all sorts of questions about what went on, and all the answers look grim, to be blunt.

But let’s keep in mind, all the senior officers, from the top to the bottom, had an obligation, if they made it clear to President Biden that leaving in the summer was bad and were told to do it anyway, they then had an obligation to take precautions to ensure that what we witnessed did not happen. And that meant that you didn’t leave primarily from Kabul, but from Bagram. And more important, that everything was carefully planned, down to the last detail and then rehearsed.

That means the senior officers involved rehearsed. And that the back briefings that occurred afterwards were then made available to Jake Sullivan and the president. Because when you go into these rehearsals, you talk about surging crowds, you talk about all the things you don’t want to happen but know could happen. Those rehearsals, the detailed plans to support them, they don’t seem to have happened. And then finally, you have this notion of a national or, excuse me, an evacuation, not necessarily a withdrawal, where you are conducting a non combatant evacuation operation that is an animal that is very different from normal combat.

You have different rules of engagement, but you also have to make available forces on standby by that can rapidly intervene if necessary to protect, actually, the forces that are trying to evacuate the non combatants. I don’t know what happened, but everyone who has any experience, particularly in the 18th Airborne Corps or with other formations inside the Marine Corps, everyone has looked at this and said, this doesn’t look right.

None of it made any sense. .

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