In Shakespear’s Hamlet, the demise of Hamlet’s father creates the conditions for the play’s action to occur, making him one of the most important characters in literature to never grace a stage or speak any lines. So it was with Tuesday’s hearing on the August 2021 U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan. For almost four hours Tuesday, lawmakers grilled the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, retired Gen. Mark Milley and the former head of Central Command, retired Gen. Kenneth McKenzie on what mistakes led to the deaths of 13 Americans and hundreds of Afghans who had worked with the United States when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August 2021.
But several of the key figures whose actions set the stage for the collapse of the country’s government and the chaotic scene at the airport were conspicuously absent from the proceedings. Among them: the current U.S. president and his predecessor, their secretaries of state, the chief U.S. negotiator with the Taliban, and Afghanistan’s former president—who fled the country as the Taliban closed in on Kabul.
Still, the message from the two former U.S. military officials was clear: In the final days of the U.S. presence in that country, the military performed as well as could be expected. Others, not so much.
The largest factor that contributed to the chaos, McKenzie said, was the State Department’s foot-dragging before ordering a non-combatant evacuation operation, or NEO, on August 14.
