Trump was questioned about whether his administration would fire or relieve from duty the military officers involved in the August 2021 withdrawal.
“I’m not going to tell this man what to do, but I will say that if I had his place I’d fire every single one of them,” Trump said, gesturing to Hegseth.
Hegseth replied that the Pentagon is “doing a complete review of every single aspect of what happened” with the deadly and chaotic August 2021 withdrawal and intends to deliver “full accountability.”
Trump has been highly critical of the United States’ chaotic and deadly departure, which happened under President Joe Biden, but was set in motion by Trump when, in 2020, he negotiated and signed a deal with the Taliban committing to an earlier timeline for the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
After Trump’s election loss in 2020, he ordered a rapid withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, though senior officials never followed through, according to testimony released by the congressional January 6 committee in October 2022.
Under Biden, who delayed the planned withdrawal by a few months, 13 U.S. service members and more than 170 Afghans were killed by a suicide bombing outside the Abbey Gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul as forces were exiting.
In the weeks before the U.S. was to fully leave, the country quickly fell to the Taliban, who seized abandoned American military equipment.
Trump on Tuesday called on the Taliban to return the U.S. equipment left behind.
“I think they should give our equipment back. And I told Pete to study that. But we left billions, tens of billions of dollars worth of equipment behind. Brand new trucks. You see them display it every year, on their little roadways,” he added.
He claimed the Taliban was selling the military weapons and gear, making Afghanistan, in Trump’s telling, “one of the biggest sellers of military equipment in the world.”
“They’re selling 777,000 rifles, 70,000 armor plated . . . trucks and vehicles,” he continued, stating, “I think we should get it back.”
He also asserted the U.S. should have kept control of Bagram Air Base, once the largest American military base in Afghanistan now controlled by the Taliban.
Trump claimed that China’s People’s Liberation Army has since taken control of the former U.S. base, which China has repeatedly denied.
It is not unusual for the U.S. military to leave behind heavy equipment when departing combat zones, as the cost of removing such gear from a country is more than the dollars it would take to replace it. But to make sure sensitive technical information doesn’t fall into the hands of enemies, troops decommission or destroy things such as aircraft, communications gear, bombs and missiles.
Over the course of the two decade Afghanistan War, Washington transferred $18.6 billion worth of military equipment to the U.S.-backed Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, according to a 2022 Defense Department report.
Of that amount, approximately $7 billion was left behind when American troops pulled out. And the Taliban was quickly able to seize the gear after the Afghan National Army collapsed.
