Pentagon leaders Austin, Milley to face Capitol Hill grilling on Afghanistan

Lawmakers will get their long-awaited chance Tuesday to grill Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley for the first time since the disastrous U.S. exit from Afghanistan, with key senators in both parties signaling that the two men will face a steady stream of tough questions.

President Biden’s leadership will also be under the gun, as lawmakers probe how the decision was made to exit Afghanistan, what the intelligence reports suggested and why the final days of the evacuation proved so costly, chaotic and violent.

Having skirted congressional hearings on Afghanistan earlier this month, both Mr. Austin and Gen. Milley will appear Tuesday morning before the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, also will take questions from the panel in what’s expected to be a lengthy, heated hearing that focuses heavily on the Biden administration’s military missteps before and during the chaotic withdrawal, and the limitations that now face the Pentagon as it crafts a counterterrorism strategy without the benefit of having assets on the ground in Afghanistan.

Those limitations have already come into focus following an admission earlier this month from Gen. McKenzie that an August “over-the-horizon” American drone strike in Kabul initially believed to have targeted an Islamic State-affiliated terrorist actually killed an Afghan working for an American aid organization and at least nine innocent people, including seven children.

But some Republican lawmakers have even broader questions and have zeroed in on what they believe was a disconnect between Pentagon leadership and top political officials in the Biden administration. They question how it’s possible Mr. Biden would have stuck by his original withdrawal plan amid mounting evidence that the U.S.-backed Afghan government was on the verge of a quick collapse and the Islamist Taliban were poised to rapidly overrun the entire country.

“Did the president really know and understand the ramifications of the withdrawal?” Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican and a member of the Armed Services Committee, said during an appearance on Fox News on Monday. “We want to know who knew what, when, and why were those decisions made?”

Military leaders are sure to be pressed on who made the call to turn over control of America’s massive Bagram Air Base to the Afghan military nearly two full months before Mr. Biden’s Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline. Critics argue that Bagram would have been an invaluable resource during the frantic airlift from the far smaller Kabul airport, the site of a terrorist attack on Aug. 26 that killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 160 Afghans.

There are also unanswered questions about why the Pentagon didn’t have a better plan in place to quickly evacuate Americans and Afghan allies in the event of a quick Taliban takeover. Gen. Milley and other top officials have said that virtually no one predicted the Afghan government would collapse in a matter of days, though many lawmakers have not been satisfied with that explanation.

Still, some analysts argue that Mr. Austin and Gen. Milley may escape with relatively little damage, given that the Senate is controlled by Democrats and that some left-leaning mainstream media outlets have already moved on from the Afghanistan debacle.