All of the officers were involved in the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which independent reviews have blamed on both the Trump and Biden administrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including 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, the two sources said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey\u2019re taking it very seriously,\u201d the person with knowledge of the plan said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Matt Flynn, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics and global threats, is helping lead the effort, the sources said. It is being framed as a review of how the U.S. first got into the war in Afghanistan and how it ultimately withdrew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMatt Flynn has nothing to do with the Trump transition team, much less leading any review concerning military justice matters,\u201d said Mark S. Zaid, Flynn\u2019s attorney. Zaid said in a statement that \u201cno one has sought out Mr. Flynn\u2019s views on this hypothetical legal scenario.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Multiple officials on the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment about this article. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe sources apparently pushing this story appear to be your typical selfish Washington, D.C., insiders seeking to gain better positioning for their own administration jobs,\u201d said a person with knowledge of the campaign. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
President-elect Donald Trump has condemned<\/a> the withdrawal as a \u201chumiliation\u201d and \u201cthe most embarrassing day in the history of our country.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is not clear, though, what would legally justify \u201ctreason\u201d charges, since the military officers were following the orders of President Joe Biden to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A 2022 independent review<\/a> by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction blamed both the Trump and Biden administrations for the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump first reached an agreement with the Taliban in 2020<\/a> to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, roughly 13,000 troops, and release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison. The Biden administration then completed the withdrawal and badly overestimated the ability of Afghan government forces to fight the Taliban on their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump\u2019s choice for defense secretary, Fox News personality Pete Hegseth<\/a>, has criticized the withdrawal, saying the U.S. lost the war and wasted billions of dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his book \u201cThe War on Warriors,\u201d Hegseth wrote: \u201cThe next president of the United States needs to radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership to make us ready to defend our nation and defeat our enemies. Lots of people need to be fired. The debacle in Afghanistan, of course, is the most glaring example.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegseth calls the withdrawal a \u201chumiliating retreat\u201d and says leaders at the Defense Department were not held accountable for the deadly attack at Abbey Gate<\/a>, which killed 13 U.S. service members and roughly 170 Afghan civilians. Nor were they held accountable for a subsequent U.S. airstrike in Kabul that officials thought would kill the Islamic State group leader behind the suicide attack but instead killed 10 innocent Afghans, including seven children, he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThese generals lied. They mismanaged. They violated their oath. They failed. They disgraced our troops, and our nation. They got people killed, unnecessarily,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAnd, to this moment, they keep their jobs. Worse, they continue to actively erode our military and its values \u2014 by capitulating to civilians with radical agendas. They are an embarrassment, with stars still on their shoulders.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The transition team is looking at the possibility of recalling several commanders to active duty for possible charges, the U.S. official said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is not clear the Trump administration would pursue treason charges, and instead it could focus on lesser charges that highlight the officers\u2019 involvement. \u201cThey want to set an example,\u201d said the person with knowledge of the plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking to NBC News days before the election, Howard Lutnick, one of the two advisers leading the transition<\/a>, said that Trump learned after his first administration that he had hired Democratic generals and that he would not make that mistake again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Former officials who worked in Trump\u2019s first administration have said they advised Trump against policies they thought would weaken U.S. national security, such as withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria. And they advised against actions that they thought might violate the Constitution or inflame tensions domestically, such as deploying active-duty U.S. troops to quell protests after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n