Republican blocks promotion of general involved in Afghanistan withdrawal

The US general who was photographed as the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan is seeing a promotion blocked by a sole Republican senator, multiple outlets reported.

The move comes amid separate reports that the incoming Trump administration is considering courts martial, for offenses including treason, for officers involved in the evacuation.

Lt Gen Christopher Donahue, 55, is Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the US army in Europe. On Thursday, his name was missing from a list of nearly 1,000 promotions approved by the Senate armed services committee.

The senator reportedly placing a “hold” on Donahue’s promotion, Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, did not comment. Citing a Senate aide, Military.com said Donald Trump’s transition team requested the move.

A Pentagon spokesperson said: “Lt Gen Donahue is a graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point and has served his country for more than 30 years.

“His appointment comes at an extremely critical time in the European region. We urge the Senate to confirm all of our highly qualified nominees. Holds on our nominees undermine our military readiness.”

The US withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, just short of 20 years after invading in response to the 9/11 terror attacks. The withdrawal proved costly: a US drone strike killed 10 Afghan civilians, seven of them children, while a suicide bomb at Kabul airport killed 13 Americans and more than 170 Afghans.

At the very end of the operation, Donahue was seen in a picture taken through a night-vision device, boarding the last plane out. Then commanding the 82nd Airborne Division, he was a much-decorated two-star general. The promotion now held up in Washington would give him a fourth star, the highest rank in the peacetime army.

Mullin, 47, is a former plumber and cage fighter who entered Congress in 2013 and won a Senate seat in 2022. Famously pugnacious, in September 2021 he stirred controversy by trying to enter Afghanistan on a private mission to rescue US citizens and Afghans who worked with the US, as Taliban forces advanced.

“I’m not Rambo,” Mullin was moved to say. “Never pretended to be Rambo … I’m the low man on the totem pole. And I understood that.”

He added: “Have we been helping get Americans out of Afghanistan? Yes … Am I extremely disappointed in how we [the US] left Americans behind? … That would be an understatement.”

Trump set the US evacuation in motion. In February 2020, his administration and the Taliban agreed that US forces would leave by 1 May the following year. After losing the 2020 election to Biden, Trump ordered the rapid withdrawal of all troops but was blocked by senior officials. Instead, the US began to swiftly reduce its presence.

In April 2021, Biden announced that all US troops would leave Afghanistan by 11 September that year, the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Citing Trump’s agreement with the Taliban, he said: “We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.”

Trump initially sought credit for starting “the move out of Afghanistan” but changed his tune after the evacuation proved chaotic. At home, amid controversy over the Kabul airport bombing and Biden’s interactions with grieving families, the withdrawal became a political football.

Though a US Central Command review found the bombing was unpreventable, Trump this year used the third anniversary of the attack to claim he would have overseen a withdrawal “with dignity and strength”. He also accused Biden and Kamala Harris, the vice-president who became Trump’s rival for the White House, of overseeing “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country” and causing “the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world”.

Pete Hegseth, the military veteran and Fox News host Trump has nominated for secretary of defense, has called the Afghanistan withdrawal a “humiliating retreat” and accused the generals who oversaw it of lying, mismanagement, violating their oaths and “disgrac[ing] our troops and our nation”.

News of Mullin’s block on promotion for Lt Gen Donahue caused a stir in Washington, particularly given a recent NBC report which said Trump transition staff were making “very serious” moves towards “creating a commission to investigate” the withdrawal.

Such moves, NBC said, included “gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason”.

That echoed comments before the election by Mark Milley, the retired army general who was Trump’s last chair of the joint chiefs of staff. As reported by the author Bob Woodward, Milley fears that with Trump back in power, retired senior military figures could be called back into uniform, in order to be court-martialed.