CENTCOM chief says Washington still mulling embassy safety plans

Commander of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said this weekend that he has provided plans to secure the US embassy in Afghanistan with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin who is still deciding.

In an interview with Military Times, McKenzie said: “We’re in a back-and-forth process, refining them, so unfortunately right now, because of that, there’s not much more I can share with you about the development of those plans.

He went on to state that the US knows “with a high degree of certainty, that al-Qaeda and ISIS, and the version of ISIS that’s in Afghanistan — ISIS Khorasan is what we call it — they both have aspirations to attack the United States”.

“Long-standing, very public track record of wanting to attack our homeland, and the homelands of our partners as well in Europe and in other places. So, this is well established and well-documented from their own mouths.

“We believe that what has prevented these attacks from being developed, both from Afghanistan and from Syria as well over the last few years, is the pressure that’s been put on these groups.

“And so in Syria, for example, we and our SDF partners work very hard to keep that pressure on them so they don’t have — particularly ISIS — the ability to generate those attack plans because they’re busy scrambling around for their own survival,” he said.

“Sort of the same thing occurs in Afghanistan. So, what would concern me the most in the long term would be a future situation in Afghanistan where there wasn’t adequate pressure kept on these groups, because we know left unmolested that they are certainly going to rebuild, restrengthen themselves, and we have no reason to doubt they don’t mean what they say when they say, repeatedly and earnestly over the past few years, that they want to attack us in our homeland,” he said.

He highlited that the US was withdrawing from Afghanistan and that the only thing that will remain, “if we can protect it”, will be the US embassy and its diplomats.

Despite withdrawing, he again noted that Washington plans to the Afghan military from just over the horizon.

“We’re still going to support them with funding. We’re going to try very hard to support the Afghan air force over the horizon; some things will come out of the country to be worked on.

“We will do some televised remote advising with them as we go forward. All those things, we will continue to do that. I don’t want to minimize this, because I think they’re going to be tested, but we will continue to support them, just not in the way we are supporting them now.”