The Biden administration ignored intelligence community warnings that its plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan would prove deadly, current and former military officials told Congress Thursday.
"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."
Testimony from Krummrich and other military brass involved in the rushed evacuation that left 13 Americans dead provides an unprecedented window into the Biden administration’s rush to leave Afghanistan as the American intelligence community warned of catastrophic failure. President Joe Biden’s White House, Krummrich disclosed for the first time publicly, "controls how we withdrew and when we withdrew, making them the majority stakeholder of many guilty parties in the failure and collapse of Afghanistan and current Taliban rule."