How America's top military men gave in to Biden's Afghanistan demands

I only listened to the first 20 minutes of the live appearance before the Senate armed services committee of US defence secretary Lloyd Austin, General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and General Frank McKenzie, commander of Central Command but it was already clear that the decisions made prior to the final withdrawal of all US troops from Hamid Karzai international airport in Kabul were all based on false hopes, wrong judgments, bad intelligence, poor vision and a disgraceful, yes digraceful sense of betrayal to the American citizens and Afghan loyalists who had been promised a safe exit from Afghanistan in the event of a Taliban takeover. Joe Biden had pledged in a TV interview that US troops in some configuration or other, would stay in Kabul until all American nationals had left. That didn't happen. The unbelieveable decision to abandon Bagram, the huge two-runway airbase which had been at the heart of all US operations throughout the 20-year war, while the Taliban were on the rampage and advancing rapidly across the country towards Kabul, and then the hasty much-earlier-than-planned evacuation from Hamid Karzai airport not only caused mass confusion and led to the dsastrous Isis suicide bombing, but also removed from the Afghan national security forces any motivation or will power to stay and fight the insurgents. They thought, if the US has given up, then so will we. And that's what happened. Kabul was handed to the Taliban on a plate. The three military men appearing before the committee had nothing to say that made that conclusion look any better or wiser or more acceptable. OK, they all agreed that, without actually revealing their advice to Biden as commander-in-chief, they did recommend, based on the appeal by General Scott Miller, the US commander in Afghanistan, that 2,500 US troops should stay in Kabul for as long as was necessary, if not for ever, to provide stability. But Biden said no, he wanted them all out by August 31. Did they put up a fight? Did any of them warn that this would be a total disaster? Did any of them threaten to resign if this was not reversed? No! Judging by what they said before the committee, they accepted the commander-in-chief's order without any fight and then made the tactical decision to get the troops out as fast as possible, most of them well before August 31. In fact there were only 1,000 troops left when the Taliban were heading for Kabul, not enough to do anything meaningful. In the end of course Biden was forced to send 4,000 or more troops to Kabul to help with the evacuation catastrophe. In my view, Biden ill-served his country, the tens of thousands of servicemen and women who had risked their lives in Afghanistan and the Afghan people by his decision, and those three military gentlemen, paticularly Austin and Milley, failed in their duty to persuade Biden to change his mind and failed in their duty to explain why it was so vital for troops to remain as a safeguard to stop a Taliban takeover and reverse all the good things that had taken place during the 20 years of war.