US military leaders must accept responsibility for the suicide bombing in Afghanistan that left more than 100 dead because they lacked any viable plan to defend the Kabul airport's perimeter, retired Army Colonel Doug Macgregor told Sputnik
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2021) US military leaders must accept responsibility for the suicide bombing in Afghanistan that left more than 100 dead because they lacked any viable plan to defend the Kabul airport's perimeter, retired Army Colonel Doug Macgregor told Sputnik.
More than 100 people, including thirteen American service members, were killed in a suicide attack at the Kabul airport on Thursday. The attack comes just as President Joe Biden's administration is already under fire for a botched evacuation from Afghanistan that has been ongoing for more than a week.
"He [Biden] must hold Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and General Kenneth MacKenzie, his CENTCOM commander, accountable for this disastrous and unnecessary American loss of life," Macgregor, who served as adviser to the acting Pentagon chief during the Trump administration, said.
Mackenzie and the strategists under his command, he added, failed to come up with any "viable plan" to anticipate and control hostile efforts to penetrate the airport security perimeter.
Macgregor, who commanded US combat forces in the Battle of 73 Easting which destroyed the Iraqi Republican Guard during the 1991 Gulf War, also blasted Biden's decision to carry out the evacuation from Afghanistan in summer - at the height of the fighting season.
Twenty years of fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan should have given the US armed forces plenty of data to recognize the fighting patterns and limitations of their enemies, Macgregor said.
"Winters in Afghanistan are bitter and cold. The Taliban, as well as, other Islamist groups like the Islamic State [banned in Russia] have a clear and consistent pattern of preferring to avoid serious fighting in the winter because of their logistical support problems," he said.
"It is remarkable that the senior US military leaders who were responsible for planning and conducting the withdrawal were shocked and taken by surprise by the rapid collapse of the Afghan Army and police force," he said.
In a press conference after the attack, Biden said he carried responsibility for everything that had happened in the past several days in Afghanistan. He also said US intelligence has tied the attack to the Islamic State-Khorasan terrorist group (banned in Russia) and vowed to hunt them down.
