Tangle - The Generals testify on Afghanistan.

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

Yesterday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Frank McKenzie, all testified before Congress. They were called up to testify about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and were slated to be questioned about the chaos and failures of the withdrawal. However, Gen. Milley also fielded questions related to several tell-all books about the Trump administration, in which he was often a central character and conceded to being a source for the authors.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul. I'm also the founder of Tangle News, and on today's podcast, we are going to be discussing the testimony that happened in front of Congress yesterday. to be discussing the testimony that happened in front of Congress yesterday. Several top military officials sat and received questions about the withdrawal from Afghanistan. A lot of news was made, a lot of stuff to digest and dissect and understand. So we're going

to do that today. Before we jump in, as always, your quick hit, some of the news you need to know. Number one, former Japanese foreign minister Fumio Kishida has won an intraparty leadership vote and will become the nation's next prime minister. Number two, YouTube says it is blocking prominent anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content on its platform. Number three, progressives in the House of Representatives released a statement saying they would sink the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure package if a promise to also pass the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package is not kept. Number four, Republicans are at odds with each other over the bipartisan infrastructure bill,

with some Senate Republicans and business groups lobbying to pass it and Republican leaders in the House hoping to sink it. Number five, Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for George W. Bush's re-election, is running for Texas lieutenant governor as a Democrat. All right, and that is it for our quick hits. Before we jump into today's topic, I just want to remind you briefly, we do not have any advertisers or investors yet on this podcast. Right now, we are relying solely on listener support. If you want to support this podcast and ensure we can keep doing this every day, please go to the episode description and click to support the podcast.

You can become a monthly pledge maker. Also, as always, depending on where you're listening, Apple Podcasts, other places you can rate podcasts, the five-star rating really is a huge, huge benefit for us. So please consider doing that. All right, that brings us to today's topic. It is the testimony that happened in front of Congress yesterday. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, and the head of U.S. Central Command, General Frank McKenzie, all testified before Congress. They were called up to testify about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and were slated to be questioned about the chaos and

failures of that withdrawal. However, General Milley also fielded questions related to several tell-all books about the Trump administration, in which he was often a central character and conceded to being a source for the authors. Before we jump in, I think it's important just to define some things and people here. The Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman is the highest-ranking military officer in the United States. That is General Milley. This is a Senate-confirmed position. The Defense Secretary, the Chief Executive Officer, and the leader of the Defense Department is Lloyd Austin.

His military command is second only to the president, the commander-in-chief. This, too, is a Senate-confirmed position. The head of U.S. Central Command, also known as CENTCOM, is one of 11 unified combatant commands of the Defense Department. Its area of responsibility includes the Middle East. It has been the main presence in Afghanistan for most of the war, And in 2019, General McKenzie became the head of CENTCOM. So we have these three leaders. Yesterday, Milley and McKenzie both refused to discuss specific conversations they had had with President Biden, but made it clear that their personal opinion was that the U.S. should have kept 2,500 troops in Afghanistan and that withdrawing those troops

would lead to the collapse of the Afghan military. Last month, President Biden denied that his top military advisors wanted to keep troops in Afghanistan, so these comments were contradicting the president. Biden told ABC that no one has said that to me that I can recall. General McKenzie also contradicted Biden, saying the war on terror is not over and the war in Afghanistan is not over. Defense Secretary Austin said that military leaders had been planning for a noncombatant evacuation of Kabul as early as spring. He also defended abandoning Bagram Air Base, the center of U.S. operations in Afghanistan for 20 years, saying it would have required an additional 5,000 troops to hold and provided little value for evacuations. Leaving Bagram was one of the most common criticisms of the strategy on the ground in

Afghanistan. Staying at Bagram, Austin said, even for counterterrorism purposes, meant staying at war in Afghanistan something that the president made clear he would not do, close quote. General Milley also defended his communications with a Chinese counterpart, which were recently cited in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's new book, Peril. In that book, Milley purportedly told China's top generals that he would alert them if the U.S. was preparing an attack. Milley said his calls were appropriate and meant as a de-escalation tactic. I am specifically directed to communicate with the Chinese by the Department of Defense guidance, the policy dialogue system, Milley said. These military-to-military communications at the highest level are critical to the security of the United States in order to de-conflict military actions, manage crises, and prevent war between great powers that are armed with the world's most deadliest weapons.

I know, I am certain that President Trump did not intend to attack the Chinese, and it is my directed responsibility, and it was my directed responsibility by the secretary to convey that to the Chinese. Now we're going to jump into some reactions from this testimony from the left and the. The left is split on the testimony, with some saying it supports Biden's telling of events and others arguing that the generals contradicted him. In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin said defense officials just debunked much of the criticism of Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal. Austin effectively conceded in his testimony that three presidents never acknowledged or at least never appreciated that the mission of the war to create a viable Afghan government and military failed spectacularly, she wrote. Austin explained this in his testimony, and this is Rubin quoting Austin.

Austin explained this in his testimony, and this is Rubin quoting Austin. We need to consider some uncomfortable truths, that we did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in their senior ranks, and that we did not grasp the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by President Ghani of his commanders, that we did not anticipate the snowball effect caused by the deals that the Taliban commander struck with local leaders in the wake of the Doha Agreement, that the Doha agreement itself had demoralizing effect on Afghan soldiers, and that we failed to fully grasp that there was only so much for which and for whom many of the Afghan forces would fight. Jennifer Rubin said the idea that the administration did not prepare for the collapse of the Afghan government was false as well. Both Milley and Austin described the

advanced planning in detail, including the pre-positioning of troops and rehearsing of non-combatant evacuation. Moreover, the Monday morning quarterbacking that the administration should have retained Bagram Air Base appears to have been misplaced. This is now Rubin again quoting Milley this time. The U.S. military cannot secure both Bagram Airfield and Hamid Karzai International Airport with the troops available. Altogether, securing Bagram would have required approximately 5,000 to 6,000 additional troops, assuming no indigenous partner force was available. Austin also said that retaining Bagram would have contributed little to the mission that we had been assigned to protect and defend our embassy some 30 miles away. That distance from Kabul also rendered Bagram of little value in the evacuation.

In USA Today, Greg Zeroya said Biden was warmed of the looming disaster but ignored the intelligence he had. Milley declined, as all presidential advisors do, to share his specific words to Biden, but the general made it easy to read between the lines, Zavroya wrote. Milley said his opinion about what would happen if U.S. forces were too rapidly pulled out of Afghanistan had been formed a year ago. Milley described to senators what he always believed would flow from a precipitous withdrawal of American troops. His list reads like a litany of horrors. The Afghan military and government would collapse. There would be a civil war or a

Taliban takeover. A region where one neighboring country, Pakistan, has nuclear weapons would grow unstable. Violent extremism would be boosted globally, and the resulting human misery in Afghanistan would include significant numbers of refugees, a degradation in health, schools, and women's rights, and revenge killings. Biden evidently listened to all of this, Zeroya said, yet he remained unfazed. So powerful was his urge to fulfill a campaign promise to bring home the relatively small number of troops deployed to Afghanistan. In Slate, Fred Kaplan illustrated the details showing nobody was blameless. Is President Joe Biden to blame or should responsibility be spread across four presidents, 11 congresses, debilitating aspects of the way America trains client states to fight wars,

and the corruption endemic to the recently deposed Afghan government, he asked. Milley shrewdly diagnosed the failure. The U.S., he said, trained the Afghan soldiers in a way that made them too dependent on our technology and our support. Take away that support, and collapse was inevitable. This analysis is true, but not remotely new. Why didn't the generals warn of these problems or suggest solutions to them back when he could have spoken and acted with on-the-ground authority? The Republicans on the committee have their credibility gaps as well, he wrote. They howled in anger on Tuesday over Biden's mishandled evacuation, which went against the advice of military officers and civilian

officials. But last year, when the GOP still controlled the Senate, they didn't hold a single hearing about the Doha Agreement, which Trump signed with the Taliban. That accord, which was negotiated without the Afghan government's participation, mandated the total U.S. withdrawal, which Republicans are criticizing now. All right, so that's it for what the left is saying. And now we're going to jump into the right's take. The right was critical of Joe Biden's withdrawal and of General Milley for his interactions with the media. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the generals contradicted Biden on Afghanistan.

President Biden hopes the political fallout from his botched Afghanistan withdrawal will fade quickly, but Tuesday's Senate hearing with the Secretary of Defense and two top generals doesn't cast his decisions in a better light, the board wrote. The hearing underscored that the president acted against the advice of the military in yanking the residual U.S. forces from the country. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley and General Kenneth McKenzie, both made clear in their testimony that they recommended that about 2,500 U.S. troops stay in Afghanistan to delay a Taliban takeover. That's not what Mr. Biden said he was told. a Taliban takeover. That's not what Mr. Biden said he was told. Asked in an ABC News interview days after the August fall of Kabul if his military advisors urged him to maintain America's small footprint in the country, Mr. Biden said, no one said that to me that I can recall. The

scandal isn't that the president ignored military advice. He's the decision maker. It's his refusal to own his decision. Mr. Biden wants the political credit for ending America's involvement in In the New York Post, Michael Goodwin said Biden alone made the fateful decisions that created the chaotic and deadly withdrawal. We now know for certain what was suspected all along, Goodwin said, that the president rejected the advice of his top military aides about how to reduce troop numbers while keeping the Taliban in check. He also falsely claimed to the public that al-Qaeda was no longer in Afghanistan and declared the withdrawal a ringing success. All three generals also said al-Qaeda remains in Afghanistan and, as Milley put it, is still at war with us, and none dared call the conclusion a success. The immediate impact of Biden's fateful decision for a complete withdrawal by August 31st included the deaths of 13 service members in the airport suicide bomb attack.

In addition, there are continuing reports that some Afghans who helped in our 20-year war effort are being executed, some of them after being tortured. The immediate consequences are obviously devastating, and the long-range reality is that another war is more likely than lasting peace. Beyond al-Qaeda's continuing efforts to strike us, giving Taliban control of Afghanistan completes what one analyst calls a mega-terror state in the region, with Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan sharing borders. In the American Conservative, Declan Leary called General Milley the most dangerous man in America.

Perhaps the most significant part of Milley's testimony, though, was his answer to allegations in the media taken from Bob Woodward and Costa's forthcoming book, Peril, that he had promised to warn China if the president ever ordered an attack against them, and that he had made senior military officials swear an oath not to take orders from the commander-in-chief unless Milley himself was involved. He insisted that two calls in question were well within his routine responsibilities as chairman, but simply neglected to comment on the allegations that he had promised to warn his Chinese counterpart of any U.S. action, which, of course, had been the most concerning part of the report by far. All in all, the general's congressional testimony reinforced what many have speculated ever since reports emerged that Secretary of Defense Mark Esper had in fact known about the secret calls to China.

That in talking to Woodward, Costa, and others, Milley exaggerated his own role as a resistance hero, perhaps underestimating the blowback from the right and others interested in civilian control of the military. interested in civilian control of the military. It's worth considering why he might have done that. The general's activity, courting powerful factions of the race-obsessed left, appending himself to key politicians of both parties, chasing media attention left and right, suggests that he does not intend to pursue the quiet life of military-industrial complex automatically reserved for retiring four stars. At 63, Milley's days in uniform are numbered, but 2024 is just around the corner. All right, that brings us to my take. So I just viewed this as a really fascinating few hours of testimony. Frankly, I was shocked at how candid the military brass were

and seemingly how often their testimony eviscerated narratives from each side. Of course, all of this should be taken with the caveat that these men are appointed officials and members of the administration, so their words need not come with more inherent credibility than those of most politicians. Still, though, the generals didn't make their opinions unknown. They knew withdrawing troops would lead to Afghanistan collapsing, even if they didn't expect it to happen so quickly. They agreed with President Biden's assessment that the Doha agreement negotiated by Trump demoralized, and forced a binary decision, stay in Afghanistan and escalate the war, or withdraw and end it. This was something Biden said repeatedly and was

criticized for, but with which the generals unanimously agreed. If we had stayed past August 31st, the Taliban would have ramped up their attacks, and 2,500 U.S. troops would not have been enough to hold them back. The generals also supported another Biden narrative, that what they pulled off was a logistical success, even if the end of the war was a strategic failure. Austin said, we had only planned to evacuate 70,000 to 80,000 people, but managed to get out more than 124,000 with aircrafts taking off every 45 minutes and, quote, not a single sortie was missed for maintenance, fuel, or logistical problems. It was the largest airlift conducted in U.S. history, and it was executed in just 17 days,

he said. The generals also noted that Americans have continued to be evacuated since the withdrawal, something many critics said wouldn't happen. I'm less convinced about the defense of retreating from Bagram Air Base. Milley argued that such a move would have required thousands of more troops, but we ended up having to deploy thousands more troops anyway when everything went to hell. Many Afghanistan vets and reporters without a reputation to protect have insisted that keeping Bagram secure until the withdrawal was over would have been prudent. As for Milley, my position remains, he should resign. That he has now conceded to spending so much time with reporters on and off the record is not a comfort, and he dodged the most important questions about In a laughably hard-to-believe comment, he told the committee he had not read the books and didn't know if he was portrayed in them accurately,

as if somehow he could have missed the front-page stories over the last few weeks, or that he operated habitually as an anonymous source without tracking how his words played out in the media. It's hard to imagine that he has many supporters left or the full trust of the military brass around him, especially now that we know for certain he acted as an anonymous source in several books and news reports. As a journalist, I should say I love this. Please keep leaking, Millie. I mean, I want to know what you think, but if I were Millie's colleagues, perhaps I wouldn't like it so much. Milley did make news by informing the committee that Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who were both serving for Trump, were briefed on his conversations with his Chinese counterparts.

That should only solidify what I said about these stories originally, that they make Trump look worse than anyone, that they make Trump look worse than anyone. That Meadows and Pompeo knew the top military officer was contradicting or undermining or actively working to contain a president he viewed as unstable and dangerous and apparently did nothing is actually quite telling. All told, the testimony was fascinating and the takeaways still seem clear to me. Afghanistan was a multi-president, two-decade long failure that ended with two bad options. Biden took the least bad one he could muster, and he executed it in a way that brought home some predictable disasters. Now everyone is going to point fingers when they all share the blame for the failures. That includes former President Obama,

the Republicans who supported Trump's Doha deal, and the military generals who repeatedly lied to us about winning the war and compounded those lies with strategic failures. Of course, George W. Bush, who led us into the war in the first place and kept us there after our mission had ostensibly been completed, shares more of the blame than just about anyone. All right, that is it for my take. And that brings us to our reader question. This is actually kind of just a funny sort of meta reader question. Alan from California, from HB California, which I actually don't know what HB means,

wrote in and asked me what happened to the comment section on the website. This is a good opportunity, I guess. I mean, I know a lot of you listening to this are listeners, so maybe not spending a ton of time on the website, but we did just complete a website migration and I have received a bunch of questions about it. And so I just figure why not use the newsletter, use the podcast to just tell people a few things they might need to know. Yes, there is still a comment section, but you have to be logged in and scroll to the bottom of the article to access it. Comments are enabled for subscribers only. So if you want to be able to comment, you have to subscribe. You can do that at readtangle.com backslash membership. The biggest difference between the new website and

Substack is that instead of logging in with a password to access subscribers only content, you get a quote magic link. That means you put in your email and then you're sent a link to log into the site. When you click the link, you get logged in and then you should be good to go for like months at a time before it kicks you out. Now that we've completed the migration, we're going to refine a few things, probably update the website's layout, which I'm not particularly crazy about right now, and add some new features. One cool thing about the website's layout, which I'm not particularly crazy about right now, and add some new features. One cool thing about the website is that I have more customization control over posts, so I'm planning to have stuff on the website that might not show up in the newsletter or the podcast.

And I will also use it to link out to this, our podcast, to our merchandise store, and all sorts of other cool projects that we have. I am working on going back and also tagging every single Tangle article newsletter that's been published with sort of like keywords and topics. That way, if you want, you can click on a topic or a tag on the website and then just read everything we've covered. So you could click Afghanistan and then all our newsletters about Afghanistan are going to come up and you could just like go through and do a deep dive on a certain topic if you want. A lot of readers have asked for that. I'm working on it. It's just going to take a lot of time and busy work to get that done. If you have any questions or problems ever with your

account on the website or this podcast or anything, feedback, whatever, you can email me, Isaac at readtangle.com. That's I-S-A-A-C at readtangle.com. And you can just reply to the newsletter. All that goes straight to my inbox. I check it frequently. I make a habit out of replying to and engaging with readers. It's one of my favorite parts about this job. So please do not be shy. All right. Our story that matters today is one on the vaccines. It's pretty interesting. Our story that matters today is one on the vaccines. It's pretty interesting. Unexpectedly, corporate America has become a central vaccine enforcer.

Yesterday, United Airlines said it will terminate 593 employees who refuse to get vaccinated. 96% of United's workers have complied. Job postings on Indeed that require vaccinations spiked 24% in the last month, and the number is rising. Google, Facebook, Netflix, Walt Disney, Lyft have all implemented vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, it's happening at the governmental level, too. A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that New York City can require all of its teachers to be vaccinated, and health care workers in New York City just hit a deadline to get vaccinated themselves. Axios has a very interesting story on the pressures mounting to get vaccinated from corporate America right now. All right,

and that brings us to today's numbers section. These are all related to the Afghanistan war. I thought they were pretty interesting. 58% is the percentage of Afghanistan war veterans who said that they backed President Biden's decision to withdraw. 42% is the percentage of those veterans who strongly supported the withdrawal. 48% is the percentage of Afghanistan veterans who described America's involvement in Afghanistan as successful. 27% is the percentage of all voters who described America's involvement in Afghanistan as successful. So 48% of veterans say it was successful, but 27% of all voters say it was. 53% is the percentage of Afghanistan war veterans who said they still support the withdrawal,

even if it means that the Taliban is now in charge of the country, which obviously came to pass. 37% is the percentage of Afghanistan veterans who said they strongly approve of former President Trump's handling of foreign policy in Afghanistan. That is the highest of any president who was in office during the war. These numbers all come from a fascinating morning consult poll. All right, and finally, you know, your daily smile, your have a nice day story. This one maybe exposes some of my biases that you guys are all familiar with in the newsletter. But the Los Angeles district attorney has moved to dismiss nearly 60,000 marijuana convictions in

the state. I know this might be controversial for some people, but I do not think that people should have criminal records for marijuana offenses in a state where recreational marijuana is legal. California approved recreational cannabis five years ago, but thousands of residents were unable to get jobs, housing, or qualify for other services because of their criminal records related to cannabis offenses. Now, officials say they have identified about 58,000 cases eligible for dismissal. The Attorney General George Gascon said on Monday, dismissing these convictions means the possibility

of a better future to thousands of disenfranchised people who are receiving this long-needed relief. It's not immediately clear just how many people are impacted by the announcement because a similar dismissal of 66,000 cases in 2020 impacted around 53,000 people. That's because one person can have multiple convictions. But CNN has a great story about this up to date. I think it's a good thing.

I hope it brings you a little bit of joy. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, please go give us a five star rating if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you can rate podcasts. And again, if you go to our episode description, there is a place where you can just click a quick link and become a monthly supporter of the podcast. It's a huge help for us. It'll keep us going. As always, www.readtangle.com has more information for you, and we will see you guys tomorrow. Tangle.com has more information for you and we will see you guys tomorrow. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman,

and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. Bye.