Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin executes his first successful withdrawal

After shepherding questionable exits from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Niger, the Secretary of Defense finally does an about-face we can be proud of by scuttling the KSM plea agreement.

Well, that didn't go quite as I expected. America's reprieve from an outrageous miscarriage of justice came from US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

There is a running joke amongst a circle of my friends and colleagues. If Washington wants to conduct a withdrawal from a difficult or unpopular situation, there is only one man for the job: Lloyd Austin. After overseeing controversial pullouts from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Niger, Austin’s retreat from the plea deal that gave 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and his cohorts life in prison is finally an abandonment we can all agree on.

As the commanding officer of US Central Command in 2011, General Austin conducted the US withdrawal from Iraq. While this egress was orderly, the outcome was predictably disastrous. Within two years of the pullout, the Islamic State of Iraq, Al Qaeda’s branch that ultimately became the Islamic State, seized control of large areas of Anbar province.

President Barack Obama had dismissed the Islamic State as a terrorism ”JV team” focused on local power. However, he was quickly forced to eat his words and redeploy US troops to Iraq as these supposed benchwarmers seized an area in Iraq and Syria the size of Britain and began sponsoring international terror attacks. Meanwhile, Iran stepped into the security breach, and Iraq has since arguably become the 32^nd province of the Islamic Republic. So, we’ll call Austin’s outcome in Iraq a tie—the withdrawal was orderly, but the results were, shall we say, less than desirable.

As secretary of defense, Austin was next hailed as the man for the job of organizing a US exit from Afghanistan, given his experience in Iraq.

It’s safe to say that the Afghanistan withdrawal was nowhere near as orderly as Iraq. There was no politically face-saving “decent interval” to be had as there was in Vietnam or Iraq; the collapse happened as the US military was on its way out the door, and the Taliban even seized Kabul before the last American troops left the country. During the chaotic scramble for the exit, 13 American troops and about 170 Afghan civilians were killed in a deadly suicide attack. Desperate Afghans plunged to their deaths while attempting to cling to the landing gear of a departing aircraft.

The Afghanistan withdrawal was clearly a loss for Austin, bringing his exit record to 0-1-1. (However, Austin and others involved in the Afghanistan debacle never paid a political price, so he may view this one as a win.)