https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/magazine\/2022\/08\/11\/the-afghanistan-deal-00050916<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“McKenzie was flying to Doha, Qatar that day to offer the Taliban a deal: Keep your forces outside the capital so the U.S. can evacuate tens of thousands of Americans and Afghans from the city, and we won\u2019t fight you.<\/p>\n
But by the time McKenzie landed, the offer was DOA. Taliban fighters were already inside the presidential palace, and Afghanistan\u2019s president, Ashraf Ghani, had fled the city. The Afghan government the United States had worked so hard to keep afloat for 20 years had collapsed in a matter of hours.<\/p>\n
McKenzie had to think fast. His mission, to conduct a massive air evacuation from Kabul\u2019s one functioning airport, had not changed. So, on the way to Doha\u2019s Ritz Carlton, he came up with a new proposal. Don\u2019t interfere with the airlift, he told the Taliban\u2019s co-founder, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and we won\u2019t strike.<\/p>\n
The general, who spoke to POLITICO Magazine by video call almost exactly one year after the fall of Kabul, walked away from the meeting with a deal that would allow the U.S. military to control the airport while they undertook the largest air evacuation in U.S. history, flying out more than 120,000 people in the span of two weeks.<\/p>\n
But during the meeting, he also made what critics say was a strategic mistake that contributed to what became a chaotic, deadly evacuation: refusing the Taliban\u2019s offer to let the U.S. military secure Afghanistan\u2019s capital city.<\/p>\n
McKenzie defended his decision during the interview, noting that he did not believe it was a serious proposal, and in any case securing the city would have required a massive influx of American troops, which could have triggered more fighting with the Taliban.<\/p>\n
At the end of the day, the U.S. military didn\u2019t have many good choices.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“I got on the airplane on Sunday morning. While I was on the airplane over, I was getting reports that the Taliban is in downtown Kabul, they\u2019ve actually overrun the city. By the time I met with them, they had significant forces inside the city. So I said, \u2018Look, we can still have a solution here. We\u2019re going to conduct an evacuation. If you don\u2019t interfere with the evacuation, we won\u2019t strike.\u2019<\/p>\n
Mullah Baradar said, off the cuff, \u2018Why don\u2019t you come in and secure the city?\u2019 But that was just not feasible. It would have taken me putting in another division to do that. And I believe that was a flippant remark. And now we know in the fullness of time that Mullah Baradar wasn\u2019t actually speaking for the hard-line Taliban. I don\u2019t know if he could have delivered, even if he was serious about it.<\/p>\n
I felt in my best judgment that it wasn\u2019t a genuine offer. And it was not a practical military operation. That\u2019s why they pay me, that\u2019s why I\u2019m there.<\/p>\n
By and large, the Taliban were helpful in our departure. They did not oppose us. They did do some external security work. There was a downside of that external security work, and it probably prevented some Afghans from getting to Kabul airport as we would have liked. But that was a risk that I was willing to run.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“I believe the proximate defeat mechanism was the Doha negotiations [on a peace deal]. I believe that the Afghan government began to believe we were getting ready to leave. As a result, I think it took a lot of the will to fight out them.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“You can go back to the very beginning of the campaign, when we had an opportunity to get Osama bin Laden in 2001, 2002 and we didn\u2019t do that. The fact that we never satisfactorily solved the problem of safe havens in Pakistan for the Taliban. There are so many things over the 20-year period that contributed to it.<\/p>\n
But yes, I believe that the straw that broke the camel\u2019s back and brought it to the conclusion that we saw was the Doha process and the agreements that were reached there.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s convenient to blame the military commanders that were there. But it was the government of Afghanistan that failed. The government of the United States also failed.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s very hard to see in Afghanistan after we left. We had 1 or 2 or 3 percent of the intelligence-gathering capability that we had before we left. All our intelligence told us that the Taliban would probably allow space for al Qaeda to reassert itself and at the same time, they\u2019re unable to get rid of ISIS. I think both are going to be entities that are going to grow.<\/p>\n
The fact that al Qaeda leader Al-Zawahri was in downtown Kabul should give us pause. It tells you first of all, that the Taliban obviously negotiated the Doha accord in complete bad faith. They said they wouldn\u2019t provide a safe haven for al Qaeda. What\u2019s the definition of a safe haven if it\u2019s not the leader in your capital city?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[435,272,355,619,158],"class_list":["post-8856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-afghanistan","tag-foreign-affairs","tag-foreign-policy","tag-united-states","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8857,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8856\/revisions\/8857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}