NAVY Times By Howard Altman 8/20/2021
Christopher C. Miller, then-President Donald Trump’s surprise pick to replace fired Mark Esper and serve as acting defense secretary, has a personal stake in the outcome of events in Afghanistan. As an officer with the 5th Special Forces Group, he was one of the first troops into Afghanistan after 9/11, and he fought with and trained Afghan forces. Miller, a retired colonel, was working on plans to leave Afghanistan by May before the election of Joe Biden. In this Aug. 18 interview with Military Times, Miller talks about his reaction to the chaos unfolding in Kabul. how the decisions to bring the war in Afghanistan have played out, his impressions of Trump, how the U.S. might prevent al-Qaida from re-establishing a presence there, why Afghan National Security Forces were unable to defend their territory, and what he might have done differently.
Some questions and responses have been edited for brevity.
MT: Chris, as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan, who fought there and helped train Afghans, what was it like to watch the fall of Afghanistan and the unfolding chaos in Kabul?
CM: It’s heartbreaking. I spent last Friday weeping all day long, because I was just so heartbroken. And then I just kind of got angry after that because I think I was going through the process of mourning. And now with what’s going on, it seems like the United States military has finally established some capabilities there. But it seems so preventable. And as a military person that understands military operations and planning and how we do these things. it really bothered me a great deal. What went wrong? I don’t know. I mean, it’s easy for me to sit here and Monday morning quarterback, and I don’t want to do that, because everybody’s doing that and all the shows, pointing fingers and whatnot. I don’t know, I wasn’t involved in those conversations. I wasn’t in those rooms, where the president and his leadership team made those decisions. I heard the president speak and you have to give them respect as he’s the president of the United States. And we all want this to turn out as well as it can. But you just can’t help but think as a former military person, as former secretary of defense … you can’t help but wonder what was going on that we mishandled this so dramatically.
MT: What made you so angry?
CM: I felt so much of this could have been prevented. With a little diligence and planning. That’s probably the most powerful part of our military is logistics and planning ability, and the ability to get any place in the world. So, I had questions and I still have questions, but the team that’s in there now, they just need our support. And I don’t want to be finger -pointing nerd second guessing or chicken-lipping them at this time. What’s concerning to me, though, is … it all seemed to start to really hit Sunday. Of course, that’s the day where the Taliban entered Kabul, with people that are stuck in bed-down locations and are in a bad way, asking for assistance. It seems like things are coming together now. But at the time, I couldn’t help wonder if we couldn’t have predicted that was going to happen. We’d been there for 20 years. Obviously, we had all the intelligence we needed there. To use the horrible Rumsfeld phrases about known unknowns and unknown unknowns, this was not an unknown unknown. This was a known known, we knew what was going to happen. Certainly, after 20 years on the ground, we had all the information we needed. And somehow it wasn’t. I want to know, I really want to know what the decision=making process was and why we didn’t take different actions and put in place different plans. So, that’s kind of where I am.
MT: What would you have done?
CM: It’s easy for me to say what I would have done. It’s not relevant. I thought we very much had a plan for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in an orderly, deliberate process. Now, why that wasn’t executed by this administration is beyond my knowledge at this time. I don’t know why that is.
MT: Have you been in touch with people who are stuck in in Kabul, maybe former Afghan security forces, Afghan interpreters?
CT: Yes
MT: What’s that been like?
CM: It’s so hard. In one weird way. I was talking to a colleague of mine that I’d grown up with and who just left a very high-level position in the military, and he replied, ‘I feel like I have a mission. For the first time, I’m just not fighting the bureaucracy or trying to protect my people, I actually feel like I’m trying to do something worthwhile and relevant.’ So, that’s it. You’re sitting there at 1:30 in the morning, on Sunday night, Monday morning, just absolutely exhausted. But you couldn’t help but think, I might be exhausted here, but I can’t imagine what those folks are going through. So, you’re like, I’m going to go a little bit further, I’m going to try a little bit more. So, in a weird sort of way, it felt like you had a mission again, but you were also just heartbroken that it all played out this way, where these people were put in such risk and without any deliberation, it seems, obviously.
MT: In your initial message to troops in November, 2020, you wrote that ‘This war isn’t over. We are on the verge of defeating al Qaeda and its associates, we must avoid our past strategic error of failing to see the fight through to the finish.’ Did we see the fight through to the finish?
CM: I thought there was a different way to end our operations in Afghanistan. I do firmly believe that. We have to remember, defeat is a very specific, very specific definition in the military. And I had to look this up. Defeat is not a permanent state. Defeat could be a temporary state. I felt strongly at the time that we had defeated al-Qaida, I still think they’re defeated. Now the question is, can we maintain pressure on them to deny them the ability to mass and train and equip and plan and execute follow-on attacks that could change our way of life? I strongly felt that we had defeated al-Qaida. We had not defeated the Taliban. We were absolutely in a stalemate at the time. I felt that in the administration that I represented — the Trump administration — I felt we had a good plan for how we were going to wind this thing down. You know, the idea was, we would force some sort of coalition interim government and use traditional Afghan processes and governmental structures — the Loya Jirga. And much like happened after the Bonn accords in 2001, 2002, of course, was the Loya Jirga. There was a way that we could have had an Afghan solution. Now the counter argument is [Ashraf] Ghani, the president wouldn’t have allowed that. I felt we still had leverage over the process. And I don’t know why we gave that leverage up. I wasn’t a part of the discussions after 12:01 a.m. on the 20th of January 2021.
More:
https://www.navytimes.com/flashpoints/afghanistan/2021/08/20/we-mishandled-this-so-dramatically-trump-acting-secdef-chris-miller-on-us-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/
