America’s top military officer: I wanted to keep at least 2,500 troops in Afghanistan to prevent Taliban takeover

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley after speaking at Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing

(Picture: Getty Images)

America’s top military officer has revealed he wanted to keep at least 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan to prevent a rapid takeover by the Taliban.

General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the 20-year war in Afghanistan was a “strategic failure” and he favoured keeping thousands of troops in the country to prevent a collapse of the US-supported Kabul government.

Defying intelligence reports, the government and its army collapsed in mid-August, allowing the Taliban to capture Kabul with what Gen Milley described as a couple of hundred men on motorcycles, without a shot being fired.

That triggered a desperate effort to evacuate civilians from the US, UK and other allied nations, as well as Afghan intepreters and others from Kabul airport.

The Senate Armed Services Committee also quizzed General Frank McKenzie, who as head of Central Command was overseeing US troops in Afghanistan.

Gen McKenzie said he shared Gen Milley’s view that keeping a residual force there could have kept the Kabul government intact.

“I recommended that we maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, and I also recommended early in the fall of 2020 that we maintain 4,500 at that time, those were my personal views,” he told the committee on Tuesday. “I also had a view that the withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and eventually the Afghan government.”

They were pressed on whether President Joe Biden had been truthful when he told ABC News on August 18, three days after the Taliban took control of Kabul, that no senior military commander had recommended against a full troop withdrawal.

Asked in that interview whether military advisers had recommended keeping 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, Mr Biden replied, “No. No one said that to me that I can recall.” He also said the advice “was split.”

Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican, repeatedly asked Gen Milley whether the comments constituted “a false statement”.

Gen Milley declined to give a direct answer, saying only: “I’m not going to characterise a statement of the president of the United States.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki later that Mr Biden was referring to having received a range of advice.

“Regardless of the advice, it’s his decision, he’s the commander in chief,” she said.

In a blunt assessment of a war that cost 2,461 American lives, Gen Milley said the result was years in the making.

“Outcomes in a war like this, an outcome that is a strategic failure - the enemy is in charge in Kabul, there’s no way else to describe that - that is a cumulative effect of 20 years,” he said, adding that lessons need to be learned, including whether the US military made the Afghans overly dependent on American technology in a mistaken effort to make the Afghan army look like the American army.