The speed with which the U.S. military abandoned Afghanistan in 2021 — including the timing of the abandonment of the Bagram Air Base — was driven not just by President Joe Biden, but also by military commanders who adopted a “speed is safety” mantra while failing to plan for the Taliban’s jailbreak of ISIS-K terrorists.
Then-CENTCOM Commander General Frank McKenzie told Congress last year that “we believed that speed brought safety” when explaining why the U.S. military conducted its retreat so quickly in 2021. Politico reported that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff both insisted in May 2021 that “speed equals safety.” Although the transcript of the press conference has been deleted, a web archive shows that Biden publicly endorsed the U.S. military’s “speed is safety” argument in early July 2021, just after the U.S. had quietly left Bagram at the start of the month.
An ISIS-K suicide bomber named Abdul Rahman al-Logari — who had been freed by the Taliban from a prison at Bagram in mid-August 2021 — has been identified by CENTCOM as having carried out the suicide attack at Abbey Gate, killing 13 U.S. service members and an estimated 170 Afghan civilians on August 26, 2021.
Military had no plan to secure terrorist prisoners as Afghanistan crumbled
Two books and multiple news articles have reported that Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan asked the U.S. military leaders in June 2021 to consider pausing or delaying the closure of Bagram, but that Austin and Milley pushed back against this and insisted on closing Bagram quickly — which Biden approved.
General Austin “Scottie” Miller, the final U.S. commander of NATO’s Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan, admitted last year in congressional testimony that he did not know of any plan to secure the terrorists held at Bagram in the possible scenario that the Taliban marched on the base.
Command Sergeant Major Jacob Smith, who served as the Bagram senior enlisted advisor in 2021, also said he was not aware of any plan to handle the terrorist prisoners at Bagram if the prison fell to the Taliban or if the terrorists were sprung from jail there.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC), led at the time by then Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, released a report on the Afghan withdrawal last year titled, “Willful Blindness: An Assessment of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Chaos that Followed.”
The HFAC report attributed Milley’s rush to close Bagram to Miller, despite citing the two books which attributed the pushback to Milley. The report also did not include the revelatory admissions from Miller and Smith about the lack of U.S. military planning for the exact scenario that occurred, with the Taliban freeing ISIS-K terrorists from Bagram after the U.S. left the base.
Just the News previously reported that, less than two weeks before the Abbey Gate bombing, McKenzie held a mid-August 2021 meeting with Taliban leader Mullah Baradar in Doha, Qatar which would end with the Taliban taking control of Kabul and the U.S. relying upon the goodwill of Taliban fighters to provide security at the Kabul airport during the evacuation.
McKenzie is currently listed as the Executive Director for the Global and National Security Institute at the University of Southern Florida. The general did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to him through his email at the school. Nor did he respond to prior Just the News reporting about him.
Milley did not respond to requests for comment sent to him through Princeton University, where he was named a visiting professor last year, and through JPMorgan Chase, where he has been a senior adviser since 2024. He did not respond to previous Just the News reporting on him.
Austin did not respond to a request sent to him through the Clarion Strategies firm which he co-founded.
As for critiques of the HFAC report, “Chairman McCaul stands by his comprehensive report, the culmination of 18 transcribed interviews, seven public hearings, and 20,000 pages of documents obtained under subpoena from the State Department,” Emily Cassil, a spokesperson for former HFAC Chairman Michael McCaul, told Just the News.
Withdrawal based on “speed is safety”
Then-Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., said he went on a congressional delegation to Kabul prior to Biden’s April 2021 withdrawal decision, where he met with McKenzie, who told him that “if we get the green light to withdraw, I’m going to do it as fast as possible, because we will be vulnerable.”
Waltz, who went on to be Trump’s national security adviser and is currently Trump’s nominee to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, said he told McKenzie that that strategy would be like “looking at the issue with a soda straw on just the military operation.”
Waltz asked the general how that took into account NATO partners, ongoing support for the Afghan military, U.S. contractors, the U.S. embassy presence, and all of the languishing Special Immigrant Visa applicants, but he said McKenzie didn’t have much of an answer except to repeat that “if I get the green light, I’m putting my foot on the gas to get the heck out of there and limit our exposure.”
McKenzie appeared before the House Armed Services Committee on April 20, 2021 where he was pressed on the withdrawal.
During the hearing, Waltz asked McKenzie: “Would Bagram Air Base be valuable to you, being where it’s located geographically, west of China, south of Russia, east of Iran?” McKenzie replied that “Bagram is key terrain.” Bagram was abandoned by the U.S. in early July of that year.
After finding out about the withdrawal order, one U.S. Special Forces operator said that after getting off the phone with Miller that he had been told that Austin “made the decision to pull everybody out starting immediately.” The retreat from the base in Helmand province lasted just ten days.
Unnamed official reportedly said “Let’s get the heck out of Dodge”
The U.S. Special Forces — best known to most people as “The Green Berets” — held a meeting with the Afghan forces they would soon be leaving to fight the Taliban alone, telling the Afghans they had themselves been blindsided by the news only recently.
Politico reported that U.S. military leadership — including Austin and Milley — put together a plan during an early May 2021 rehearsal of concept (ROC) drill which “called for the military to draw down to zero within 60 days of Biden’s official order, or roughly mid to late June — far sooner than the September 11 deadline the president originally set.” An unnamed defense official who attended the ROC drill told the outlet that all of them made the same argument, namely, that speed equals safety.
A former U.S. defense official said that U.S. military leaders “just decided they lost the argument, and okay, fine, let’s get the heck out of Dodge.”
Miller described in his testimony last year the risk and danger that came with going down to zero during the military withdrawal, stating that his primary focus, after Biden decided to remove all U.S. forces, was getting those service members out safely: “But, at that point, my focus was, how do I get these guys out of here without hurting somebody? And I’m going to be very honest with all of you. … I don’t usually get scared. I don’t. I was scared. And you know what I was afraid of? I was afraid I was going to lose somebody … where I’m holding them there too long as I’m trying to get them out. And I was concerned.” Miller said that “we were worried about the Taliban” and what it would do after May 1, 2021.
McKenzie wrote in his memoir that “In fact, the withdrawal had been paced by the dictum that ‘safe was fast’ and that we would also show our intent clearly to the Taliban by moving aggressively and unambiguously. The president was presented with many opportunities to change the pace of the withdrawal, and he always pressed for speed. He was right to do so.”
Biden publicly endorsed the military’s “speed is safety” mantra on July 8, 2021, saying, “Our military commanders advised me that once I made the decision to end the war, we needed to move swiftly to conduct the main elements of the drawdown. And in this context, speed is safety. … Conducting our drawdown differently would have certainly come with an increased risk of safety to our personnel. To me, those risks were unacceptable.”
McKenzie said during his 2024 book tour that he had thought in 2021 that the Taliban would try to interfere with the U.S. military’s withdrawal, but also argued that it was obvious that the Taliban wouldn’t interfere with the withdrawal because the Talibs were getting what they wanted — the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces: “The Taliban did not interfere with that activity. And of course they wouldn’t — they wanted us to leave. I thought — I was wrong in that I thought they would still interfere with us. I’m happy to be wrong in that.”
Justifying the lightning-fast withdrawal from Afghanistan
The U.S. military’s bailout from Afghanistan was lightning fast, and NATO’s withdrawal from the country was too. Biden gave his Go-to-Zero order on April 14, 2021 — and less than ninety days later, by July 2, 2021, the U.S. had abandoned almost all its bases in Afghanistan, including Bagram Air Base.
U.S. forces handed over Camp New Antonik in southern Helmand province to the Afghan military in early May 2021, New Camp Brown in Kandahar and Camp Morehead on the outskirts of Kabul in mid-May 2021, and the New Kabul Complex and Blockhouse in late May of 2021.
Despite the Taliban’s advances, U.S. forces handed over Camp Stevenson in Mazar-i-Sharif on June 1, 2021, and CENTCOM announced on June 7, 2021 that more than half the retrograde process was now complete. Camp Dwyer in the Helmand River Valley was handed over in mid-June 2021 and Camp Arena in Herat and Camp Lincoln next to the main airport in Mazar-i-Sharif in late June 2021.
McKenzie told the HFAC that “it was by design” that the U.S. military left Afghanistan so quickly after Biden’s withdrawal order. He cited “concerns about the Taliban attacking us, concerns about ISIS being able to carry out attacks, but also a desire to have room at the back end in case we had trouble, we had weather problems, we had aircraft problems that slowed us down.”
McKenzie dismissed the idea that a slightly slower withdrawal could have staved off the Afghan military’s collapse: “The Afghan military was read in from the beginning about the pace of the withdrawal, and frankly… I don’t think waiting another 30 days would have had any material impact at all on the Afghan military’s ability.”
A reporter noted to Pentagon press secretary John Kirby on June 21, 2021 that the Taliban was making rapid advances and asked if Austin was considering a slowdown in the withdrawal or other changes to minimize the collapse of Afghan forces. Kirby replied that the withdrawal was “on pace” and that Austin, Milley, and McKenzie “are constantly looking at the pace we’re going at” and that Austin “is looking at the situation every day with a fresh set of eyes to see if, you know, the pace we’re setting is the appropriate pace for the kinds of capabilities we need to conduct a safe and orderly retrograde.” If anything, the pace only increased.
A Republican congressman asked Austin and Milley on June 23, 2021, if the U.S. military withdrawal was happening “at an appropriate pace” or if it was happening too quickly, given the Taliban’s military victories on the battlefield. Austin replied that the goal was “to conduct our retrograde in a safe, orderly, and responsible fashion” and said “we have accomplished the task according to plan thus far.” The U.S. military would be almost entirely gone from Afghanistan in a little over a week with the closure of Bagram.
NATO forces had largely left Afghanistan by the end of June. An analysis of the announcements by the governments of nineteen allied nations showed that the vast majority of NATO and European troops — more than 4,800 of them — had also departed by the end of June 2021. Bagram was shuttered on July 2, 2021.
Milley made his case to rush the closure of Bagram Air Base
U.S. Forces – Afghanistan (USFOR-A) produced a timeline that said Bagram’s closure was “paused” on June 11, 2021. Politico reported that the pause happened “so the White House could get a better sense of what leaving the base would mean.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that “as the process of closing Bagram neared the point of no return, the military paused the shutdown on June 18 so the White House could ponder the ramifications of giving up the U.S.’s premier air base in the country.”
Politico reported that Jake Sullivan was “worried about the security situation in Afghanistan, and wanted to understand the military’s tactical plan for the drawdown.” The Wall Street Journal cited “U.S. officials” when it reported that Sullivan “questioned whether it was prudent to close the base so soon.”
Sullivan reportedly called Austin and Milley in the summer to ask the generals if Bagram could be kept open longer and if the timeline for its closure could be delayed, according to multiple books. Sullivan reportedly considered this meeting to be a “gut check” moment, according to The Last Politician.
Austin and Milley reportedly “made a passionate case that defending Bagram while trying to leave the country would prove too difficult and risky a task” and would pull resources away from carrying out the retrograde, while also potentially putting U.S. forces at Bagram at risk of Taliban attack, according to The Internationalists. The book said Milley reportedly told Sullivan that “we’re too pregnant to stop it.”
The Wall Street Journal also reported: “A new intelligence assessment, prepared in mid-June at the request of Gen. Milley said Kabul could fall six months after the U.S. military left. That was when Mr. Sullivan at the NSC raised questions about shutting down Bagram, according to U.S. officials. With only two weeks before most of the military was due to leave, the base was in the process of being closed. The Pentagon, which was also cognizant of the significance of the impending move, paused the shutdown for several days, so Mr. Biden and his aides could reconsider the timing of closing the base. Keeping it open would delay the Pentagon in carrying out Mr. Biden’s plan to remove the vast majority of American troops. … Briefed about it, U.S. officials said, Mr. Biden backed the military plan, affirming Bagram’s closing.”
The outlet reported that, on June 22, 2021, Biden then “signed off on the plan to close the base on July 2 and keep only a limited military presence on the ground.”
The HFAC report stated that “Sullivan appears to have called Secretary Austin and General Miller for their assessment, inquiring whether Bagram could be kept open longer. Both military officials asserted that Bagram could not be defended while trying to leave the country and maintain force protection.”
The HFAC report cited two books on Biden — The Last Politician and The Internationalists — with both books clearly stating that this alleged interaction involved Milley, not Miller. Nevertheless, the final HFAC report attributed the rush to Miller instead of Milley.
Taliban thrilled about U.S. leaving Bagram
The U.S. military evacuated from Bagram in the middle of the night. Afghan military officials quickly claimed the U.S. military shut off electricity to the base and left without alerting the incoming Afghan base commander, General Mir Asadullah Kohistani, who said he had heard a “rumor that the Americans had left Bagram” and by the morning it was confirmed that the U.S. was gone.
Kohistani claimed he only learned the U.S. had departed several hours after their 3AM departure from the base: “We did not know of their timeline for departure. They did not tell us when they left.” Darwaish Raufi, the Afghan district administrator for Bagram, contended that the U.S. departure from Bagram had occurred without proper coordination with local Afghan officials.
McKenzie wrote in his memoir that it was “simply not true,” contending that “the Afghan chain of command was completely informed.”
The Taliban were thrilled that the U.S. had abandoned Bagram and considered this a big step toward a total U.S. departure from Afghanistan — and a big step toward their conquest of Kabul. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid tweeted on July 2, 2021 that “we consider evacuation of all U.S. forces from #Bagram a positive step & seek withdrawal of foreign forces from all parts of the country.”
Biden: “I want to talk about happy things, man!”
The Taliban also used the closure of Bagram as another opportunity to mock the struggling Afghan government and military.
“The Kabul administration [Afghan government] has no justification for insisting to remain. Even the foreigners who spent countless dollars to build this institution are now hopeless and seen fleeing. The world saw that they secretly withdrew from various military bases in the country, including Bagram, and did not even inform the worthless Kabul administration officials about their withdrawal,” the Taliban’s Voice of Jihad crowed on July 10, 2021.
Then-Congressman Waltz tweeted in response to the news about the Bagram closure: “It’s by far the biggest symbol of our 20 years of blood and treasure we have expended for all veterans that have served there. As our only base sandwiched between China, Russia, and Iran, it’s a huge strategic asset. Why are we just giving it away?”
When asked about Afghanistan, Biden said on July 2, 2021 that “we’re on track exactly as to where we expected to be” related to the retrograde, and he said he was worried about the Afghan government’s capability to hold on. When one reporter started to ask a follow-up question on Afghanistan, an irritated Biden cut him off and said, “I want to talk about happy things, man!”
Kabul would fall the next month.
U.S. military had no plan on Taliban freeing ISIS-K terrorists from Bagram
A mid-May 2021 article for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute predicted that the Taliban would free ISIS-K terrorists from prison when they quickly took over Afghanistan: “ISKP dissolved its territorial holdings in Kunar and Nangarhar provinces and began ‘surrendering’ to the Afghan government in droves, with thousands of fighters putting themselves in Kabul’s prisons in 2019 and 2020. … The purpose of the ‘surrender’ is to proselytize and multiply inside prisons in preparation for ISKP’s ‘breaking the walls’ campaign to free them and quickly re-establish itself following the U.S. withdrawal. … ISKP is also betting on the Taliban quickly overrunning the country and freeing all prisoners, regardless of affiliation, in the chaos, amplifying its own attacks.”
General Miller admitted to the HFAC that “I don’t know that we had a plan” to secure the terrorists held in prison at Bagram in the event that the Taliban advanced toward Kabul. Command Sergeant Major Jacob Smith also told the HFAC that “I was not” aware of any contingency planning to deal with the terrorist prisoners at Bagram should the prison fall to the Taliban or should the prisoners be released.
The HFAC report did not include any mention of these pieces of testimony from Miller and Smith, with the final report making no mention of the lack of planning for the terrorist prison at Bagram.
Ross Wilson, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, reportedly knew on August 15, 2021, that the U.S. had “recently obtained information that the Taliban was planning to seize two prisons near Kabul and release everyone inside” — including thousands of Taliban fighters as well as ISIS-K and al-Qaeda terrorists, according to The Internationalists.
When asked if he ever raised concerns about the prison at Bagram before the base was closed, Wilson said, “Not that I recall.” When asked if he ever raised concerns about the prison at Bagram prior to August 15, 2021, he replied, “I am quite sure that I didn’t personally.”
Taliban’s jailbreak replenished ranks of ISIS-K’s terrorists
Air Force Colonel Alex Pelbath, the Air Mission Commander during the NEO, later described Parwan prison as “the Gitmo of the Middle East” and said there were “arguably worse people in it than Gitmo.”
Sir Laurie Bristow, the last U.K. Ambassador to Afghanistan, wrote in his book that, on August 11, 2021, “in Kandahar, the Taliban overran the prison and released more than 900 prisoners. Many of them were Taliban and, as anticipated, would be heading straight for the fighting, for revenge and for their share of the victory spoils. The Taliban were preparing to attack Bagram Airfield and the Parwan Detention Facility next door.”
Bristow said that, on August 14, 2021 (one day before the Taliban took Kabul), the British received “unconfirmed reports that the maximum security prison at Pul-e Charkhi had been overrun and the inmates released. This huge wheel-shaped facility was very close to Kabul: planes flew over it on final approach to Kabul airport. It contained thousands of hardened Taliban and other fighters.” He said that he texted British Brigadier Tom Daly, the senior UK military representative in Afghanistan, asking how many Taliban were at the prison at Bagram, and that Daly responded, “7200 inmates, 3,186 are TB [Taliban].”
An Afghan official with its Defense Ministry said in the summer of 2021 there were roughly 5,000 prisoners at Bagram, while a regional security official said there were more than 7,000 prisoners at the base. The vast majority of the prisoners were terrorists, including members of ISIS-K and al-Qaeda, along with Taliban fighters.
U.S. officials later told The New York Times that, when combining the Taliban jailbreaks at Parwan prison in Bagram and Pul-e-Charki prison near Kabul, the Taliban sprung over 12,000 prisoners in total. A United Nations Security Council monitoring team later assessed that the size of ISIS-K roughly doubled “following the release of several thousand prisoners.”
The Pentagon’s Kirby claimed ignorance on August 16, 2021, relating to what had happened to the prisoners at Bagram after the Taliban took control: “I do not know the fate — the state of the prison or those — or of those prisoners.” Kirby said on August 27, 2021 — the day after the Abbey Gate bombing — that “I don’t know the exact number” of ISIS-K fighters that had been released by the Taliban but that “it’s in the thousands.”
One U.S. military officer whose name was redacted but who was involved in planning for the NEO told investigators that, between August 1 to 10, 2021, “the Taliban were poised to seize Bagram and release the 5,000 prisoners there. We always said that when the prison got hit it was a tide that couldn’t be turned. It would add thousands to the Taliban ranks.” The officer said that, on August 15, 2021, “information begins to flow in indicating that the prison has been liberated and that the prisoners are joining a column of Taliban advancing from the north.”
Tom West, the former Khalilzad deputy who became Biden’s new Afghan envoy, later said that “I don’t know who within the Taliban opened the jail doors, and I don’t think they knew exactly who they were letting out.” West also claimed to HFAC that the Taliban released ISIS-K terrorists “I think unbeknownst to them.”
West assessed that the Taliban released at least 2,000 ISIS-K fighters, and he admitted that “some of the most concerning, best-trained ISIS-K fighters were let out” and that “some of those individuals our folks were truly worried about.”
- Reporter’s disclosure
A quick word about this author (a disclosure I shared in my prior pieces on Milley and McKenzie). I co-authored a book — KABUL — on the withdrawal and evacuation from Afghanistan and, prior to joining Just the News, I worked as the senior investigator on the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC), specifically tasked with reviewing the bungled Afghan withdrawal.
I quit the committee in protest last August over disagreements with then-GOP Chairman Michael McCaul over how his investigation was run and over what was edited out of the drafts I wrote before HFAC’s final report was published last September.
In full disclosure, I have also been serving as an independent factfinder in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ongoing review of the Pentagon’s failings during the Afghan withdrawal, but I am participating in that exercise solely as a journalist. I’m not paid by any government agency and my participation is solely to help provide Just the News readers and the American public a better understanding of what led to such a disaster.
