conditions, it failed to fully honor any other condition. under the doha agreement and perhaps for the united states national security the taliban has never renounced their linkages with al qaeda or broke their affiliation with them. we in the united states adhered to every condition. in the fall of 2020, my analysis then was that an accelerated withdrawal without meeting specific and necessary conditions risks losing the substance gains made in afghanistan. would potentially damage u.s. worldwide credibility and could precipitate a collapse of the afghan security forces and the afghan government resulting in a complete taliban takeover or general civil war. that analysis was a year ago. based on my advice and the advice of the commanders at the time, then secretary of defense esper recommended we maintain
significant and concerning to the point where secretary of defense esper, admiral davidson and myself along with others had conversations about it and i was directed by then secretary of defense esper first he directed his assistant secretary of defense for asia pacific defense to make calls and then me. this is all done with oversight and i tried to lay that out in the memoranda and time line that you can use. we ll have to leave it at that. happy to take it up at a later today. mr. courtney. thank you to the witnesses for your service and testimony today. one comment mr. chairman before questions over the last month including yesterday s senate hearing we heard a lot that the u.s. had lost credibility with its allies. last week we saw firsthand in washington how mistaken that claim was. on wednesday last week i attended a ceremony in the senate where the australian
that as shameful of him? yeah. look, in situations where we ve made a decision that you re going to have a chairman of the joint chiefs call to his counterpart, and i participated in several of those, you discuss it among the principles of the nsc, informally, phone calls and whatnot, and there s generally agreement and it goes ahead. so i find it very hard to believe that pompeo, meadows, perhaps others, haspel, wouldn t have known about it and concurred with it. so i was stunned a few days ago to hear this interview by mike pompeo that you just played because pompeo had to be reading the same intelligence as milley. and milley told him. shouldn t pompeo shouldn t meadows, shouldn t miller and esper be put in that same
de-escalate at secretary of defense esper s direction. eight people sat on that call. with shortly after my call ended with general lee, i personally informed both secretary of state pompeo about the call among other topics. somehow we have two problems. why didn t hawley apologize to milley at the senate armed services committee hearing? he was there. he had it wrong. he called for the guy who said it was treason. he said he had to resign. why didn t they call secretary of state pompeo? secretary esper? chief of staff meadows and miller? don t they want to know why these guys didn t reveal that they knew? they were closer to the president than milley. and does anybody really believe that these senators had no idea
at that level, and there are a lot of people talking about it who obviously don t have the slightest idea how it works. i haven t heard anybody say anything to the contrary. one key point mentioned apparently in woodward and costa s book, then secretary of state defense, motivated by intelligence reports that the chinese leadership worried that in this kind of chaotic environment they saw, they might be subject to a wag-the-dog-style attack. esper and milley both concluded absolutely correctly that if the chinese leadership is in that kind of mood, they could make a miscalculation. they could also believe that we were in disarray, and they might seek to take advantage of it. so the notion that the rough a number of different levels that the you asked government would