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Sec. Hegseth Orders New Review of Afghanistan Debacle
Although several reviews have been conducted to figure out what actually happened in Afghanistan during our disastrous exit, Pete Hegseth thinks there may be more to learn after 3.5 years since the incident:
President Donald Trump and Hegseth have repeatedly blasted the Biden administration for the manner in which the withdrawal was conducted, which Hegseth said Tuesday was ‘disastrous and embarrassing.’ He said the new review will interview witnesses, analyze the decision-making and ‘get the truth.’
You might remember some of the details and images that many of us watched during the execution of the plan:
The Abbey Gate bombing during the final days of the Afghanistan withdrawal killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans, and wounded scores more. It triggered widespread debate and congressional criticism, fueled by searing photographs of desperate Afghans trying to crowd into the airport to get out of Kabul, with some clinging to U.S. military aircraft as they were taking off.
Some people regard it as the most disastrous foreign policy action under the Biden administration.
A statement was issued by the Department of Defense calling for the review:
Today, I am directing the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and Senior Advisor Sean Parnell to convene a Special Review Panel for the Department into the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Sean Parnell spent 485 days serving in Afghanistan. Sean was wounded in action along with 85% of his platoon and lost countless friends to the War on Terror. It is fitting that he will lead the effort to reexamine previous Abbey Gate investigations conducted by U.S. Central Command during the Biden Administration. In addition, Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, a combat-decorated Marine officer who spoke out about the Afghanistan withdrawal, and Jerry Dunleavy, an author, journalist, and investigator who helped lead the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation into the Afghanistan withdraw, will serve on the Special Review Panel.
Some of you may recognize the name of Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller. He was the man who criticized senior military leaders over the Afghanistan withdrawal and their unwillingness to be candid about what had occurred and why. The military responded accordingly:
Scheller received a punitive letter of reprimand and was ordered to forfeit $5,000 of one month’s pay in October 2021 after pleading guilty to showing contempt toward officials, showing disrespect toward superior commissioned officers, willfully disobeying a superior commissioned officer, dereliction in the performance of duties, failure to obey an order or regulation, and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.
Today, Scheller’s words are echoed in the words of Pete Hegseth.
Let justice be done.
Published in Military
That we had to get down to the level of lieutenant colonel before an officer was prepared to say “this is stupid” says quite a bit about the status of the senior ranks, none of it good. Milley says he advised against pulling out of Bagram before Kabul. What he didn’t do was resign in protest. Thee should have been a wave of such resignations.
These gutless wonders are still with us, too. I suspect that Hegseth is trying to root them out. It’s time for us to have real warriors leading our military.
This is good. I am interested in revisiting the USS Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Lusitania, and the USS Liberty. I am tired of the Col. Jessup line of “You can’t handle the truth.”
Why not “Sec. Hegseth”? Or, “Def.Sec. Hegseth”? I have not seen “secty” before.
Just a small typo. It was, no doubt, meant to be “secsy”.
:)
FIFY
Don, why are you being snarky about this? The men and women who concocted this blunder remain in power and can be brought to account. A full investigation was essential in 2021 and remains essential now.
This charade of a withdrawal, which amounted to a surrender, and became one of the only surrenders in history wherein the surrendering party took significant losses of its service people, definitely needs investigation.
There is also the matter of 80 billion dollars worth of military equipment being left behind for the Taliban.
I thank God frequently for the fact that Hegseth has an important role in this administration.
So do I!
It’s fine that he is doing this, but who is going to investigate Trump’s Ukraine debacle?
Somewhere out that in the ether is a video of Trump campaigning where he said there were 13 generals who should be fired. As usual, he was promising to do it in his first 24 hours in office. Well, better late than never, I suppose.
Let ’em sweat. Watch who they contact.
I think that can wait until after it happens.
I did not intend snark. I would seriously like honest reports on all those things. And WMD too!
As for Abbeygate, the buck stops with Biden (or one of his aids acting on his behalf). The problem was not with the folks in uniform, but the folks in suits giving the orders that created a doomed situation. It is going to be hard to bring anyone to account, when the person responsible cannot remember what he had for breakfast.
I’m sorry to have misread your tone, Don.
I get that a lot….maybe it is me!
I am just feeling like accountability is going to be disappointing. I do encourage any efforts towards truth an accountability. I think Ron Johnson has been tireless in his efforts and I wish more in Congress were like him. My Senators (Cruz and Cornyn) do not care at all about political corruption. My House Rep (Roy) is a good on border and deficit, but does not care about past corruption. Perhaps they don’t see the connection between political corruption/accountability and deficits/border security, but to me corruption (bad unaccountable governance) is the root cause of all our problems.
The value in re-visiting Abbey Gate may lie simply in ensuring that Americans are given another opportunity to ponder the price we’ve paid for having an anyone-but-Trump president, semi-secretly non compos mentis, unelected puppeteers wielding the autopen while the leader of the free world snoozes and a self-blinkered media refuses to notice let alone report on any of this.
I remember my dad telling me that Americans who were against the war in Vietnam waxed indignant about the corruption of the South Vietnamese government. And it was corrupt, in ways that Ho and the North Vietnamese leadership were not. (At least, not yet). Americans, Dad said, have a hard time imagining anything worse than corruption, but there are worse things. As the post-war killing fields would demonstrate.
That’s meant to be comforting… not dismissive! I, too, am outraged by corruption. Still, better a corrupt, hypocritical Bernie Sanders (or, for that matter, Obama) to a pure commie with real integrity.
I wish them well as they review all the documents that haven’t been destroyed..
I am really looking forward to the results of this review. All previous ones were done under the auspices of the Biden administration, so are suspect. I consider Scheller a hero for his stance. I remember it well, and his video. I think we can be sure that whatever the findings are they will not be buried. If any of the commanding generals share responsibility for the debacle with the administration, they should be discharged with less than honorable status, and, perhaps, given the same treatment that Lt. Col. Scheller was subjected to. As for the administration’s people, they should be branded as what they are and, hopefully, never be allowed to hold positions in the government again.
The deaths of those young people, not to mention the Afghans who were also killed or maimed, is appalling. However, the leaving behind of billions of dollars worth of supplies which are now serving as a source of income for the Taliban by being sold off to every tin pot leftist organization as well as our enemies is beyond absurd. This was a betrayal unlike any the United States has ever suffered at the hands of its leaders.
I recently watched a video series on the Vietnam war. The final segment showed them dumping helicopters off of the ships to make room for fleeing Vietnamese and Americans. That, at the time, probably seemed incredibly wasteful. Compared to what the Biden administration did when they left Afghanistan, it was a literal drop in the bucket.
They should have. I believe that the ‘generals’ testified before Congress and to a man, if such a term is appropriate here, that they advised against the sort of withdrawal upon which the POTUS was so insistent, believing, just to start with, that such a rapid and chaotic abandonment of the country would endanger the troops and make it impossible to evacuate US citizens, allies, and friends either successfully or safely. None of them, from Thoroughly Modern Milley on down seems to have believed that the Afghan army was in control of the situation, or to have been surprised that Kabul fell so quickly; in fact, they testified that they had already informed the President and the National Security Council of their fears. Biden, OTOH was assuring the public beforehand that the Afghan army was entirely capable of securing the country, and that there was no way that the world would be treated to scenes reminiscent of the evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975, only to have remarkably similar scenes on display less than a month later.
Once it became evident that the Afghanistan withdrawal was turning into the [insert rude, but appropriate descriptive compound noun here] that it was, and three days before things became much, much worse, The Telegraph wrote on August 23, 2021, an article headlined “Joe Biden’s aides ‘too afraid’ to tell him he was wrong on Afghanistan, say White House insiders“:
Stuart Scheller’s first video was made on August 26, 2021, just after the Abbey Gate debacle. He later reposted it on his own youtube channel:
The irony that’s so evident now is that, yes, the “generals” did do some of that. But, when the stubborn, power-hungry old fool didn’t listen, none of them had the guts to “throw [their] ranks on the table” and blow the whistle.
The Afghanistan withdrawal was the first inflection point of the Potemkin Presidency, the first time it might have been derailed by the actions of a few honest men. But only one showed up in real time, and he of a rank apparently so insignificant that it was easy, at the time–and as he fully expected to happen–to disgrace and ruin him.
I wish Stuart Scheller well in this endeavor, which I’m sure he’s undertaking in a humble spirit and for the sake of his brothers and sisters-in-arms.
All very well said, She. If I recall correctly, you did a post on Scheller back when.
Seconded.
PS:
We could do with more Smedley Butler types in our military.
If Biden was already too for gone, those generals made the decisions. Remember when that one useless dodo went into the hospital and didn’t notify Biden? We can trace the leaderless, autonomous execution back to at least that far and we can assume autonomous behavior was already a habit by then.
Speaking of habits…I had what a co-worker of mine used to call an “epitome” when I read your comment.
I discovered, in the Tapper/Thompson book (I read it so no-one else has to), that the Biden family made strenuous efforts to cover up the fact that Beau Biden was suffering brain cancer during his second term as Attorney General of Delaware, and before he announced that he was going to run for Governor in 2016. According to the book, Beau’s wife didn’t like the secrecy, and felt that the public would be supportive if they knew of her husband’s situation, but Joe and Beau refused to release any details.
Beau Biden had suffered a mild stroke in 2010, during his first term as Delaware’s AG. But the 2013 situation (back to the book) was much more serious, with Biden undergoing brain surgery in September of 2013 at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Two months later, Biden said that he’d been tested for a medical condition, but had received a clean bill of health. (I believe a compliant doctor was trotted out at the time to agree that was the case.) It wasn’t until February of 2014 that a neurologist acknowledged that a “small lesion” had been removed from Biden’s brain the previous September. And it was some time after that that his father said that they removed a tumor “larger than a golf ball” from Beau’s brain.
All the while (2014-2015), according to the book, on many occasions when VP Joe had instructed his spokesworms to say that he was taking a break at the Biden compound in Delaware, he was in fact flying all over the country with Delaware’s Attorney General, with the two of them looking for, and Beau undergoing, treatments for Beau’s cancer, with him being surreptitiously admitted to several state-of-the-art cancer facilities under the name “George Lincoln.”
Beau Biden completed his second term as Delaware’s Attorney General in January of 2015. He died of glioblastoma multiforme, five months later.
I had a look to see what was written at the time, and found this from the Delaware Business Times in June of 2015:
And this, from of all places, Delaware’s NPR station, in May of 2015:
I worked in hospital systems for thirty years, and I know all about a patient’s privacy rights. But I also have strong views about public servants and their obligations to notify the voters about health (or any other) concerns which may materially affect their ability to do their jobs, even on a temporary basis. I believe it so strongly that I think the public interest should trump the patient’s privacy rights in such cases, even if the onus is on the public servant himself to reveal the condition. And I think public servants who aren’t straightforward with the public about such matters are derelict in their duty.
With the Beau Biden situation, and the Joe Biden situation as background, your mention of the Lloyd Austin situation appears as just a logical extension of the same. No wonder POTUS wasn’t bothered by the precipitous disappearance of his SecDef (twice; first for the procedure, and then for the lengthier hospitalization for the complications). For Biden, it was just business as usual.
You know what they say: Once is happenstance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times…
Thanks, yes, I did a series of them.
If you are a public servant, keeping health secrets is despicable and unacceptable. You owe this information to the public. Why wouldn’t a person reveal the information?
I’ve said from the start that FJB didn’t really care about the actual Afghanistan “withdrawal,” it was rushed because he just wanted an applause line for a speech on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Insufficiently cynical…
And insufficiently snarky 😎
I think powerful people (no matter their venue; politics, entertainment, culture, professional, and so on) have–generally speaking–an aversion to admitting to weakness, because they see it as diminishing their hold on power and influence.
I do give the British Royal Family some credit in this regard. Charles (who’ll be 77 in November) immediately disclosed his cancer diagnosis in February 2024. It came out of his treatment for a publicly-revealed prostate condition. (The reports from his office say it’s not prostate cancer.) Kate, who is only 43 and is the mother of three young children, was a little more restrained, but in March 2024, she did disclose an unwelcome diagnosis obtained as the result of a biopsy from “female” surgery she had two months previously–in January 2024–when “cancer” was, at first, not suspected.
Neither of them has disclosed the particular type of cancer they suffer from. By doing so, they have preserved a modicum of privacy for themselves. Some might say they should have disclosed the specific cancer, so we can show a momentary explosion of “care” for this, or that, type of cancer. Others may say that they’ve generalized their diagnosis to the point that we might show a momentary explosion of “care” for all those with cancer. YDY.
After nine months of chemo, Kate’s doctors pronounced her “cancer free” and she has largely returned to public life. But I don’t know a cancer survivor in my own life who’s considered himself or herself scot-free after such a diagnosis. Their lives are lived with bated breath, from “scan” to “scan,” from that moment forward. I doubt she’s any different.
Charles has been undergoing weekly cancer treatments for more than a year, but has taken almost no time off as a result of the side effects, which have visibly aged him, but he plugs on.
I think they’ve both been heroic.
Good point. Is that because our current crop of generals are cowards or because a general quitting today would not make a ripple in a our corrupted media and the Biden handlers would care at all. We have 5X more generals than we need, who’s gonna miss one? If nothing else, quitting would give them a clear conscience, which used to mean something.