Now Biden’s Military Blames Afghanistan Mess on the State Department

 

Biden’s military says the mess in Afghanistan was not their fault – it was Biden’s State Department’s fault.

Of course, Biden’s military is going to deny any wrongdoing in Afghanistan.  Today Biden’s military leaders blamed the Afghan mess on the State Department.  FOX News reported:

Top Pentagon officials blamed the State Department for not beginning evacuations of civilians from Afghanistan sooner, calling the efforts “chaotic,” while defending the “skill and leadership” of U.S. troops during a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday focused on the military withdrawal.

The U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan was complete on Aug. 31, after successfully evacuating more than 124,000 individuals from Kabul – including 6,000 American citizens. Despite the large number of evacuations prior to the withdrawal date, at least 100 American citizens and thousands of Afghan allies remain in Afghanistan.

Pressed on why evacuations did not begin sooner, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said it was a “State Department call.” 

“We provide an input, as I said in my opening statement, to the State Department,” Austin said, explaining, though, that officials were “being cautioned” by the Ghani administration that “if they withdrew American citizens and SIV applicants at a pace that was too fast, it would cause a collapse of the government that we were trying to prevent.”

“I think that went into the calculus,” Austin said.

He added, though, that military officials “provided our input” to the State Department.

“We certainly would have liked to see it go faster or sooner,” Austin said. “But, again, they had a number of things to think through as well.”

Later, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley described the evacuation efforts in the days leading up to the Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline as “chaotic,” when asked about the best way to extract U.S. military from Afghanistan.

“I just want to be clear – we’re talking about two different missions,” Milley said. “The retrograde of troops … that is complete by mid-July, and that was done, actually, without any significant incident. And that’s the handover of 11 bases, the bringing out of a lot of equipment … that was done under the command of Gen. Miller.”

The numbers of Americans or green card holders in Afghanistan has not been released by the State Department.  They clearly don’t want Americans to know how many Americans were left behind.

Biden’s media thought it was a good idea to show an American soldier and noting he was the last soldier out of Afghanistan.