Blinken Gets Subpoenaed as Military Officers Testify There Was No Afghanistan Withdrawal Plan | Frontpage Mag
Rep. McCaul signed the subpeona with a pen from the family of a Marine killed at Kabul airport.
“There was very little intelligence to suggest the Biden administration’s plan would work and a mountain range of evidence to suggest the plan would fail,” retired Col. Seth Krummrich, former chief of staff for special operations at U.S. Central Command, testified on Thursday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The president’s decision to ignore the best military advice and execute an immediate military withdrawal was a shock and a rude awakening for all the planners.”
Another senior military leader, Command Sergeant Major Jacob Smith, warned State Department officials in the months leading up to September 2021 that Kabul International Airport—the eventual site of a terror bombing that killed 13 service members—was not equipped to handle a mass exodus of Americans. But the administration refused to shift the evacuation to the more secure Bagram Air Base, which had been shut down by the time of the withdrawal.
Bagram, Smith revealed, “had a completely secured airfield that would require a massive military offensive to overrun or breach.” Kabul airport, on the other hand, was surrounded by a city of 4.4 million residents and not even completely controlled by U.S. forces, presenting a host of security challenges.
Bagram also had “the mechanical capability to destroy sensitive equipment on an industrial scale in a short time,” while Kabul airport “did not,” according to Smith. If the State Department had chosen Bagram as the site of its evacuation, the military likely could have destroyed much of $7.2 billion in sensitive military equipment that was left behind and ultimately seized by the Taliban.
