Top US general in ‘pain and anger’ over Afghanistan situation after withdrawal

With the United States finally completing its troops withdrawal in Afghanistan, hastily ending its extended two-decade-long military mission in the war-torn country, one of its top generals has now expressed “pain and anger” over the situation which has long plagued the land now overrun by Taliban insurgents.

“When we see what has unfolded over the last 20 years and over the last 20 days, that creates pain and anger,” said General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Wednesday. “And mine comes from 242 of my soldiers killed in action over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Milley added, however, that he was a “professional soldier” and was thus going to contain his pain and anger and continue to execute the mission at hand.

Notably, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was completed on Tuesday morning, has been dissed as “hasty” and “chaotic” by many of the Biden administration’s critics, including former US president Donald Trump, several Republican leaders, and even officials in China and Russia.

The rapid takeover of Afghanistan by Taliban came amid the US withdrawal, and many considered it a “tactical mistake” to leave the war-torn nation at the mercy of the militants. “Afghanistan under Biden was not a withdrawal, it was a surrender,” Trump had said, adding that leaving people behind for death is an “unforgivable dereliction of duty, which will go down in infamy.”

Now one of Biden’s top military generals has also voiced displeasure with the administration’s decision to mark a chaotic and messy exit from Afghanistan’s longest war. “I have all the same emotions, and I’m sure the secretary does, and anyone who served,” General Milley said. “And I commanded troops. And I wasn’t born a four-star general. I have walked the patrols and been blown up and shot at and RPG’d and everything else. My pain and anger come from the same as those grieving families, the same as those soldiers that are on the ground.”

The “mess” that the Biden administration had made over the Afghanistan withdrawal was exacerbated, according to critics, by the terror attack on Kabul airport which killed 13 US service members, including 10 members of the Marine Corps, many of who were barely in their twenties.

US defence secretary Lloyd J Austin III on Wednesday honoured those who died over the course of the war in Afghanistan. “Our forces risked their own lives to save the lives of others, and 13 of our very best, paid the ultimate price,” he said, adding that the administration has managed to evacuate around 6,000 American citizens and a total of more than 124,000 civilians from Afghanistan.