The promotion of President Joe Biden’s pick to lead U.S. Army forces in Europe and Africa has cleared the Senate after an unexplained delay.
The promotion of Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue — who led the 82nd Airborne Division during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan — to the rank of four-star general was approved quietly before the Senate adjourned.
Donahue’s promotion was conspicuously left out of a tranche of hundred of routine military nominees confirmed before the Senate’s Thanksgiving recess, indicating a senator was holding up his nomination. Several outlets reported that Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a critic of the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, had placed a procedural hold on Donahue’s promotion.
A spokesperson for Mullin did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the hold.
Now the commanding general of the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps, Donahue led the 82nd Airborne as it secured the airfield at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport as Americans and Afghans were evacuated as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in the summer of 2021.
Touted as the final American service member out of Kabul, Donahue was pictured in a grainy photo climbing aboard a cargo plane at the end of the evacuation. The image went viral at the time.
At the same time, President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have criticized Biden administration’s decisions surrounding the withdrawal, and have slammed Biden in particular over a suicide bombing during the evacuation at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate that killed 13 U.S. military personnel.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to fire senior officers involved in the pullout. NBC News also reported following the election that Trump’s transition team is compiling a list of senior officers involved in the withdrawal and weighing whether they could be court martialed.
Donahue has led the 18th Airborne Corps since 2022. He also led Special Operations Joint Task Force Afghanistan and served as the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s deputy director for special operations and counterterrorism.
