Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates Criticizes US Withdrawal From Afghanistan

Appearing on CBS’s 60 Minutes, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates slammed President Joe Biden over the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“It was really tough for a few days there. I actually wasn’t feeling very well. And I realized it was because of what was happening in Kabul. And I was just so low about the way it had ended,” he said in a video excerpt tweeted by 60 Minutes on Thursday. “And I guess the other feeling that I had was that it probably did not need to have turned out that way.”

Interviewer Anderson Cooper pointed out Biden’s defense that, as Cooper put it, “any withdrawal is messy.”

“Certainly the military considers the withdrawal the most dangerous part of an operation,” said Gates, who served as the Pentagon’s leader between 2006 and 2011 when there was war in Afghanistan. “But they really had a lot of time to plan beginning with the deal that President [Donald] Trump cut with the Taliban. So that was in February of 2020.”

“Once President Biden reaffirmed that there was going to be a firm deadline date, that’s the point at which I think they should have begun bringing those people out,” added Gates, who has said in the past that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Watch above, via CBS.

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