Former President Biden issued a preemptive pardon to Gen. Mark Milley on Monday, capping off a presidency marred by the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021.
Milley accepted the pardon, saying in a statement he does not want to spend the remainder of his life fighting ‘retribution.’
But critics of the withdrawal in Congress say they aren’t done with him.
‘Mark Milley might be pardoned, but we will continue to explore ways to hold him accountable,’ said Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., an Afghanistan veteran.
Post-withdrawal assessments largely question why the military pulled out of the region before civilian evacuations were complete.
Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has admitted the withdrawal where 13 U.S. troops lost their lives was a ‘strategic failure.’
During a Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in 2024, Milley blamed the State Department for delaying a Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (NEO), or an order to withdraw U.S. civilians working in the country, but praised the military’s actions.
That order did not come until mid-August 2021, just two weeks before the deadline Biden had set to leave the country.
‘I think that was too slow and too late. And that then caused a series of events that resulted in the very last couple of days. There’s a lot of other mistakes that [were] made along the way… [but] I think that was the key.’
‘The U.S. military is responsible for supporting the State Department in a non-combatant evacuation operation, however, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from a combat theater as it relates to an act of war is the responsibility of the Department of Defense, and at the end of the day, we did not leave a residual force behind,’ Alex Pritsas, a former counterterrorism official at the Defense Department, told Fox News Digital.
Milley said in congressional testimony in June 2021 that the U.S. would not see scenes reminiscent of the fall of Saigon in Vietnam, where U.S. personnel were being airlifted from rooftops.
‘I don’t see Saigon 1975 in Afghanistan. The Taliban just aren’t the North Vietnamese Army.’
Milley’s pardon was part of a group of preemptive pardons that included Anthony Fauci and members of the January 6th Committee.
‘My family and I are deeply grateful for the President’s action today,’ Milley said in reaction to the pardon.
He went on: ‘After 43 years of faithful service in uniform to our nation, protecting and defending the Constitution, I do not wish to spend whatever remaining time the Lord grants me fighting those who unjustly might seek retribution for perceived slights. I do not want to put my family, my friends, and those with whom I served through the resulting distraction, expense, and anxiety.’
Jerry Dunleavy, former top investigator on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Afghanistan probe, told Fox News Digital of the pardon: ‘Milley wrongly dismissed the obviously correct comparison between the fall of Saigon and the impending fall of Kabul, massively inflated size of the Afghan forces, woefully underestimated the speed and scope of Taliban district control, then pushed fiction that Afghanistan fell in only 11 days.
‘After a disaster where 13 troops were murdered at Abbey Gate and the Taliban regained power, Milley then wrongly predicted Ukraine would fall to the Russians in just three days,’ he added, referring to remarks Milley made in a closed-door briefing with lawmakers.