Attacked on 9 11. War in afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking. Bret two President S, two messages. Good Evening Welcome to washington. Im Bret Baier a monumental decision about americas longest war almost 20 years after troops went into afghanistan, President Biden is taking Criticism Tonight from both sides of the aisle over his announced intention to withdraw all of them by September 11th this year. The last administration, the Trump Administration also planned to remove forces this year. But there are questions about whether the afghans can prevent the taliban and Al Qaeda from regaining a terrorist Foot Hold in the region, specifically inside afghanistan. White House Correspondent Kristin Fisher has Details Tonight live from the north lawn. Good evening, kristin. Good evening, bret. President biden just made one of the biggest, most consequential decisions of hiS Presidency. A full withdrawal of u. S. Troops from afghanistan. President biden says it was
Of course from a military perspective in terms of the retrograde of the people and the equipment, that planning was done by central command and certainly principally by general miller, very detailed planning. and then we came back and briefed the entire interagency on the details of that plan. okay. so the military planned the evacuation. did president biden follow your advice on executing on the evacuation plan? he did. did president biden give you all the resources that you needed? from my view, he did. did president biden ignore your advice on the evacuation at any point? no, senator, he did not. did he refuse any request for anything that you needed or asked for? no. so the president followed the
Behind in afghanistan, the military is going to stay until we get them out. general milley, did that statement turn out to be true or untrue by the president? i think that was the intent, but we gave him a recommendation on the 25th of august to terminate the mission on the 31st of august. the statement was untrue. let me ask another question. general milley, general mckenzie the president around the same time said, quote, al qaeda was gone from afghanistan. was that true or not true? was al qaeda gone from afghanistan in mid august? true or not true? al qaeda is still in afghan. they were there in mid august. they have been severely disrupted over many many years. so it wasn t true. general mckenzie? al qaeda was present in afghanistan. the president called this entire retrograde operation an extraordinary success. general miller in his testimony disagreed with that assertion.
National army based on american doctrine, tactics, techniques and procedures. that made a military that may i will await full evaluation may have been fully dependent on us and contractors and higher tech systems in order to fight a counter insurgency war. we need to explore that. the intel. how did we miss the collapse of an army and government in 11 days? other factors not strictly military. things like legitimacy of the government. corruption, parasitic nature of the police forces. a whole series of 10 or 20 i wrote down just a week or two that need to be looked at comprehensively over time. we know where the former president of afghanistan is today? and how much money he took with him? do we have any idea?
Resistance to the taliban. we did not adequately plan for the possibility of a real kol ps. we need to explore processes to understand why we were unrealistic and how to correct that going forward. the most important part of the question is why military we trained for 20 years at a cost of 800 plus billion collapsed so quickly? i can think of three reasons after i put them on the table i would like each of you beginning with general mckenzie to address the question. we can do it when we come back after lunch. the collapse may show our training was insufficient and it did not prepare the afghan military to defend the country on their own. that should have been our goal. we failed to accomplish it. if so, how must we change our thinking about training foreign militaries? second, the lightning collapse may not prove were poor fighters be demoraleized. did they lack confidence in their own political and