The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 could now amount to a charge of “treason” for current and former senior U.S. military officers who were directly involved. According to NBC News, a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan said Donald Trump’s transition team is compiling a list and is considering court-martialing the officers for their involvement.
Officials working on the transition team are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal, gathering information on who was directly involved in the decision-making process for the military, how it was carried out and whether military leaders could face serious charges such as treason.
“They are taking it very seriously,” the person with knowledge of the plan said. Matt Flynn, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for narcotics and global threats, is helping lead the effort, the sources said. It is a review of how the United States entered the war in Afghanistan and how it withdrew.
It is by no means clear, however, what would constitute legal ground for “treason” charges: the military officers were following the White House orders.
The withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan – after 20 years of presence in the Asian country following the 2001 invasion – had originally been decided by President Trump in 2020. The White House at the time reached an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. forces, about 13,000 troops, and release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison.
The plan was then implemented by the Biden administration in 2021, but apparently the Pentagon badly overestimated the ability of the Afghan government to fight the Taliban on its own. In a matter of a few days, the Taliban conquered Kabul and the retreat of the last American citizens and their Afghan helpers became a shambles that evoked the desperate flight from Saigon in the last days of the Vietnam war, complete with hurried airlifts and desperate people waiting on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport (not all of them were able to leave).
Donald Trump condemned the withdrawal as a “humiliation” and “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country.” However, a 2022 independent review by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction blamed both the Trump and Biden administrations for the chaotic U.S. withdrawal.
Former Fox anchorman Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for secretary of Defense, wrote in his The War on Warriors that the U.S. lost the war and wasted billions of dollars: “The next president of the United States needs to radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership to make us ready to defend our nation and defeat our enemies. Lots of people need to be fired. The debacle in Afghanistan, of course, is the most glaring example.”
Apart from the disastrous handling of the retreat, the Afghan withdrawal – by the U.S. forces and many of their NATO Allies – is widely considered a demonstration of the failure of the overall Western strategy in the country. After twenty years, and an invasion spurred by the 9/11 attacks, the Western presence in Afghanistan was not sustainable in terms of expenditure or results. The country and the local fighters proved as difficult to conquer as the Soviet Union had discovered in the 1980s’. The extremist Taliban fighters that Washington had vowed to eradicate came back into power, and in the last three years they have dismantled every tentative approach towards democracy and every improvement in terms of civil rights. Most notably, women, who were finally on a path in public life, are now again deprived of all agency, prohibited from studying or working or moving outside the house.
