A State Department report last week that laid some blame for the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan on its own poor planning was a "very disingenuous, self-aggrandizing" document that mainly highlighted what the department perceived as its "great moments" during the crisis, retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier Gen. Blaine Holt said on Newsmax Sunday.
"It's a terrible report and it's a very unfortunate missed opportunity," Holt, a Newsmax contributor, commented on "Wake Up America." "The report breaks down into a very light, soft touch, highlighting what they perceive as great moments they had during the crisis and then putting a very light touch on who's to blame."
Holt also insisted that the State Department should not have been in charge of the withdrawal.
He noted that the withdrawal crisis went back several weeks before the fall of Kabul, when it was learned that the Qatari had cut a deal with then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to "make him go away at the critical moment."
"These are the folks who were supposed to be our partners and allies," said Holt.
The report also spreads some blame to the Trump administration, but they "arguably would have shut down any type of pull out if the Taliban had been breaking all the rules that they had been."
Meanwhile, retired U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Jonathon Myers, also on the program, said he agrees with Holt on the quality of the report.
"Having worked at the State Department for a decade, the report, it almost seems like it's written by a college student," said Myers. "It's a pat on the back [with] vignettes of their success, little dramatic stories of rescues they made."
One of the incidents described, he added, was "100% lifted from the Marines. It was something that the Marines and the retired Marines coordinated together, but they put it in the report as if it was their own."
Further, he said, the report gave a "little lip service" to President Joe Biden, but by the end blamed everything on former President Donald Trump.
"Whatever the president is saying now about Afghanistan is completely opposite of what the situation on the ground was," but now he's "rewriting history."
Holt also on Sunday discussed the aftermath of Wagner group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin's attempted coup last month in Russia, telling Newsmax that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin's hold is "pretty secure" in the situation.
"He's doing what dictators normally do in this type of playbook," said Holt. "He thwarted a coup and we're going to see a purge. We're already starting to see it…rest assured, we're going to hear about more deaths, and people falling out of buildings. We just had somebody found drowned in the Volga River, who was a senior official, a senior prosecutor."
Myers added that he does not think the attempted coup will have an impact on the war in Ukraine. He noted that he knows a great deal about the Wagner organization after giving briefings while working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including information about the group's actions in Africa and the Middle East.
"There are only two possibilities as to what happened last week," said Myers. "The first is that Prigozhin tried to execute a military coup but turned around and saw that there was nobody behind him…the second possibility is that this was all organized as a fishing expedition to see who would follow him."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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