The NPR Politics Podcast - Military Officials Recommended Trump, Biden Keep Troops In Afghanistan

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee today about the Afghanistan withdrawal.Each said that, before the Taliban's swift takeover and subsequent evacuation of Americans and allies from Afghanistan, they recommended American troops remain in the country. They also said they were caught by surprise at the speed with which the Afghan government collapsed.This episode: White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe, Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, this is Brandon Witt in New Orleans, and I'm celebrating with the Pumpkin Spice Latte because I just heard from my oncologist. Two and a half years cancer-free. This podcast was recorded at... It is 2.40 p.m. on Tuesday, September 28, 2021. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but you should celebrate with a latte of your own. And maybe a brownie.

Okay, here's the show. Yeah, no better reason to celebrate than that. Like, that's amazing. Congratulations. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And Tom Bowman is here. He covers the Pentagon for us. Hi, Tom.

Good to be with you. So Tom is here with us today because today top Pentagon officials are testifying before the Senate. It was the first time since the completion of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and it was very contentious. Why would you propose a plan that didn't get all American citizens out? I just can't imagine ever in the history of this country our U.S. military would propose to leave a country without our citizens coming out first. I mean, have we ever done that before? All of the American citizens wouldn't leave, Senator, unless there was a noncombatant evacuation. And, you know, the plan was to leave the embassy there.

That was Republican Senator Rick Scott questioning Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Austin was testifying with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and Commander of U.S. Central Command, General Kenneth McKenzie. And clearly, this comes after a very chaotic, a very controversial drawdown in Afghanistan that drew criticism from allies, from Republicans, from Democrats. Tom, what did they have to say about how this withdrawal played out? Well, they tried to put the best face on it. Lloyd Austin, the Defense Secretary, touted the scale of the airlift, the largest airlift in U.S. history. 124,000 Afghans were pulled out, and about a third of those are off to European countries. General Mark Milley acknowledged, listen, the war didn't end the way U.S. had hoped with the Taliban in charge.

But he said, listen, the Afghan military collapsed in 11 days. The earliest estimate was sometime in October or November, maybe. But he noted, listen, the U.S. did not have advisors in the field for the past three years with the Afghans, and it's hard to assess morale or will to fight without Americans and Afghans actually together in the field. Mara, one thing that the Republicans kept returning to was their view that Biden did not follow the advice of his military advisors, and that the administration should have asked the Pentagon about the possibility of keeping troops past the end of August sooner, that they should have looked into that. I mean, that's one of the big criticisms

of the way this was handled. That's right. And Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, was asked about that today because remember, President Biden went on ABC and told George Stephanopoulos that he did not get advice from his military advisors to stay, even though today you heard testimony that some of his military advisors did say he should leave 2,500 troops there. Today, Jen Psaki tried to clarify that and said that the advice President Biden got from his military advisors was split. In other words, there was a whole range of risk assessments. It wasn't as if they unanimously said that 2,500 troops should stay there. But that is something that Republicans really hammered on,

that Joe Biden was not being truthful when he told George Stephanopoulos that his military advisors did not suggest to him or advise him to keep troops there. They're trying to attack the president's credibility in addition to relitigating what is clearly the worst episode of Biden's presidency so far, where he made a big miscalculation that it would be possible to get U.S. troops and U.S. citizens out of Kabul without a loss of life. This is one of the biggest, well, it has been the biggest crisis of outside of the pandemic of his administration so far. Do you feel like the political argument that it was time to get out, do you think that continues to kind of stand up when he's facing this onslaught of questions of why did you allow the, or why did you pull the troops out

without, you know, getting all the Americans out? Why, you know, you had American troops die? Do you think that that that they're able to keep that argument? Well, I think I'd call this a miscalculation rather than a crisis, because the policy that you're referring to, the decision to pull out of Afghanistan is supported by majorities of Americans. It was the execution of that policy, the fact that you had soldiers and service members die as the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, the fact that the military didn't anticipate the speed of the Taliban takeover. That's what's causing the problem for Biden. This is a decision he made on his own. And as he said many times, the buck stops here. I think that this was a big blow to the credibility

of the Biden administration. And to the extent that Afghanistan fades from the headlines and that the American people go back to not caring very much about it, I think he can probably survive this. But the fact that you had a kind of bipartisan reaction to the pullout and the way it was executed, and the fact that the generals were so honest today and candid about the kind of advice they did give the president, it's something that is going to be hard for him to spin any other way than, as General Milley described it, a logistical success in terms of getting people out, but a strategic failure. You know, what I find interesting is this is the first serious hearing they've had on Afghanistan in quite some time. Congress never really got into Afghanistan. They never really

did the correct oversight they should have, really over the past 20 years, because nobody wanted to own this. It was hard to stay. It was hard to leave. So they had perfunctory hearings. They would have the generals come in before they went to Afghanistan or maybe once a year and just leave it at that. You never had the kind of serious hearings you had during the Vietnam War, the Fulbright hearings at that time that went on for years. Nobody wanted to own this mess. All right. Well, let's take a quick break and we will have more on the hearing when we get back. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made time at the beginning to respond to this reporting from Bob Woodward talk about Milley supposedly doing like a secret call to the Chinese military because there was concerns that Trump might do something to, you know, start some sorts of conflict. But but what did Milley have to say about that? He pretty forcefully pushed back on that, right? Well, not only pushed back, he contradicted the reporting and said there were no secret calls with the Chinese General Li. Milley said the two calls were cleared by Defense Secretaries Esper

and his successor, Chris Miller, that there were readouts to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. And there were people on the calls, eight people on one of the calls, 11 on another. So hardly secret calls, as the book claims. And this was a big deal because there were some people who were saying if this was true, then they were trying to say that Milley was engaging in some sort of really treacherous or traitorous activity like that. That was why there was this focus on this idea. And also the idea that maybe Milley was so concerned about Trump that he felt the need to reach out to his counterparts. Oh, absolutely. There were a lot of people calling for Milley to

resign. Some said it's a crisis in civilian military operations. There were a number of op-eds written in the large newspapers about this. And turning back to Afghanistan, there was this moment that really stood out to me. Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas asked Milley about why he didn't resign when Biden did not take his advice about keeping troops in Afghanistan. And so I want to just play a bit of that exchange. As a senior military officer, resigning is a really serious thing. It's a political act if I'm resigning in protest. My job is to provide

advice. My statutory responsibility is to provide legal advice or best military advice to the president. And that's my legal requirement. That's what the law is. The president doesn't have to agree with that advice. He doesn't have to make those decisions just because we're generals. And it would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to just resign because my advice is not taken. This country doesn't want generals figuring out what orders we are going to accept and do or not. That's not our job. The principle of civilian control in the military is absolute. It's critical to this republic. In addition to that, just from a personal standpoint, my dad didn't

get a choice to resign at Iwo Jima. And those kids that are at Abbey Gate, they don't get a choice to resign. And I'm not going to turn my back on them. I'm not going to resign. They can't resign, so I'm not going to resign. There's no way. If the orders are illegal, we're in a different place. But if the orders are legal from civilian authority, I intend to carry them out. That was a little tutorial on the chain of command. And Milley's not in the chain of command, actually. But I guess that's a little tutorial about how the military and civilian authorities in this country operate. And what I thought was really interesting is General Milley is not Republicans' favorite

general because they perceive him as pushing back against Donald Trump. There was this confusion over his call to his Chinese counterpart, which Tom Bowman just explained. And that was the context, I think, for this question from Tom Cotton, who said, why didn't you resign if the president didn't take your advice? Well, General Milley just explained why you don't resign just when the president doesn't take your advice. waivers for that because there's this idea that the military, that there should be civilian control of the military, right? That there should be this wall there and that that's important to have because the military doesn't run the country in the U.S. Like that's not what happened. So to hear it kind of put out that way, that stood out to me, especially when, you know, during the former administration, you had Trump often talking, talking about my generals and things like that. And, you know, obviously he fell out of love with all of the generals, but he liked them at first.

Like there was a lot of, you know, very, you know, praise of the generals. Right. Yeah. The bottom line here, the buck stops with the commander in chief. Yes. All right. Well, Tom, thank you for stopping by and helping us, you know, unpack this, you know, very big hearing. You're welcome. That's all for now. We're going to leave it here. We'll be back tomorrow in your feeds. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.