US forces effectively surrendered to the Taliban in Afghanistan when it was decided to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, according to the former head of the American military in Europe.

Asked about the withdrawal, first announced by President Donald Trump, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges told GB News: “It was a surrender document to the Taliban without the Afghan government being involved.

“That put us in a position where the Biden administration would have to do something that they absolutely did not want to do or pull out.

“The manner of the decision-making to pull out without working more closely with all the allies in time, the failure to anticipate the number of refugees, certainly that blame could be laid at the feet of the Biden administration.”

Commenting during an interview with Tom Harwood on GB News, he criticised President Trump’s claim that he would have organised an orderly withdrawal.

“That’s a ridiculous assertion by the former president,” he said.

“Any notion that somehow we could just pack all our stuff up and leave…in a way that would keep the Afghan government able to defend itself, as well as working more closely with our allies who had been in there with us for so many years, – it’s ridiculous for the former president to assert to somehow his plan, we would just kind of pack up and leave in an orderly way and have some sort of orderly transfer of power to the Afghans.

“This is not the 18th century where the United States gets to make decisions over the heads of a smaller government.

“There are several mistakes that we’ve made and I have to admit, I have my fingerprints on two or three of them that led to this.

“The way we ended up, we built an Afghan security force that was extremely well equipped, very capable. I was convinced when I departed Kandahar and at the end of 2010, that this was going to work.

“What I failed to see right in front of my very eyes, was that we had built an Afghan security force that looked just like us.

“They had plenty of brave intelligent officers and soldiers but the model that we built requires thousands of contractors, endless fire support, endless logistics, and exquisite intelligence.

“When we left the Afghans had none of that. So that was a mistake on our part, how we develop their security forces.”

He added: “A couple of months before the end, I remember telling somebody, ‘don’t worry, you’re not going to see Taliban and pickup trucks with black flags riding through Kabul, which of course is exactly what happened and just a few weeks after I said that.

“I’m reluctant to point the blame at any of our intelligence services and I have to say it was not just US intelligence that was here. We had intelligence networks working together from multiple countries, some of the best intelligence agencies in the world.

“We got this wrong, and I think it was less about the Taliban. It was more about how we failed to fully appreciate the depth, or the lack of willingness for Afghan people to defend themselves for their own government.

“The final mistake…Pakistan was never an ally, we the US, we tried to convince ourselves that Pakistan was an ally.

“We were not willing to do what it took to make sure that they would not support the Taliban or give them safe haven. We were not willing to do that. And we paid the price.”