CNN "Anderson Cooper 360" - Transcript: Interview with Angus King

Interview

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BERMAN: Joining us now, Armed Services Committee member, Senator Angus King, Independent of Maine who caucuses with Democrats on the committee.

Senator King, thanks so much for being with us today. Look, General McKenzie and General Milley, they wouldn't say exactly what they recommended to the President, but they were pretty clear with what their assessment was, and what their desire would have been, to keep some troops in Afghanistan for a longer period of time, and that was presumably what they advised the President. So when the President said he didn't get that advice, do you think he

was being honest with the public?

SEN. ANGUS KING (I-ME): I don't know, because, you know, I wasn't in on those conversations. But I think it was clear from the testimony today that the military, or at least the two Generals that were in front of us believe that maintaining some presence in Afghanistan would be a good idea. The President obviously rejected that advice.

I don't know what he was told or what the conversations were in the Oval Office. Neither General would testify about what the exact content was, but they told us what they thought their preference was.

But I think, John, the interesting thing about the hearing today was, it was if there's something that's the opposite of deja vu, that's what we had today. We had a hearing that should have been taking place a year and a half ago when the Trump administration made an agreement with the Taliban that we were going to leave Afghanistan on a date certain, May 1st of 2021.

So, there was a lot of the debate today about whether that was the right policy, and I think that's a legitimate subject for debate, but that really wasn't the subject of the hearing. The hearing today was supposed to be about the withdrawal, and you can argue whether we should have stayed -- General Milley did say something important I think in the hearing. He said a lot of things that were important.

But one of them was, had we decided to stay past August 31st, we would have definitely taken casualties. We would have had the Taliban attacking our people, which they had held off from since the Doha Agreement, and a heightened problem of likely terrorism.

So the President made a judgment on August 31st that he was going to remove the final troops and not trigger what would have turned into another war probably requiring more troops back in.

BERMAN: You just scooped me, I was going to play that exchange. That was an answer to a question that you asked about the August 31st withdrawal date. You, Senator, have written extensively on needing to take time to know really what happened there, to ask the right questions and get the right answers. So what questions do you still have after today's hearing?

KING: Well, a lot of them were cleared up, and unfortunately, part of the -- one of the best pieces of testimony took place in the closed session. And by the way, John, you would have been amused. You saw a lot of speechmaking and table pounding in that open session. We had a closed session a few hours later, none of that occurred. It was like a whole different set of senators. All of a sudden, all of the histrionics sort of went away.

But anyway, we had really good testimony about a number of topics. One was, what was the expectation of the timing of the collapse of the Afghan government? Nobody anticipated it would happen even before our troops were all the way out of the country. It happened on August 15th. Even the Taliban was surprised according to press reports that Ghani fled and the Afghan Army just melted away.

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KING: So one of the key questions is, should the Biden administration have anticipated this and be better prepared for it? Number one, nobody was predicting it. Number two, we learned today that they were prepared for it. That they had war gamed the possibility of something like this, and that's why they had troops stationed in nearby countries that were brought in once things got out of control with the airport.

Within 16 hours, they regained control of the airport, because they had troops from the 82nd Airborne and Marines that came in, so yes, the first day was definitely chaotic. We've all seen those pictures. But after that, when they got control of the airport, getting out 120,000 people in 17 days, flights every 45 minutes with no breakdowns and maintenance problems and those kinds of things, was really an amazing achievement involving nine countries that they had to line up on the fly to take a lot of these folks.

BERMAN: Senator, very quickly. You heard General Milley's explanation regarding the calls he had with his Chinese counterpart. What if any concerns are you left with about how these calls played out?

KING: None. He was doing it at the direction of the Secretary of Defense. He was doing his job and he may well have prevented a war. From the reports that he released in a public statement, the Chinese were worried about an October surprise. They were worried about some kind of provocative attack and they were thinking about whether they had to preemptively come against us. He calmed them down and that was an act of patriotism.

BERMAN: Senator King, thanks for joining us tonight. We appreciate watching you during the hearing. Thank you very much.

KING: Thank you.

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