Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State under President Donald Trump, blasted President Joe Biden over his assessment of the US military troop withdrawal “deal” with the Taliban noting that critics who are blaming the Trump administration for what’s going on right now in Afghanistan are way off base.
“It is nonsense,” Pompeo told the National Review of the critique of the Trump administration. “It is, in fact, nonsense on stilts.”
Pompeo ripped Biden for wrongly (possibly intentionally) interpreting a conditions-based agreement he and former President Donald Trump made with the Taliban over US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“We knew this was going to take many, many months. Constantly trying to convince the Afghans that they were going to have to take down the temperature on their civil war,” Pompeo told the outlet.
“That they were going to have to find a modus vivendi for power-sharing amongst the different tribes and ethnicities. This is a millennial project. I was under no illusion that this would happen on my watch.”
Back in February 2020, the former secretary of state signed an agreement with the Taliban that created the May 1, 2020 US troop withdrawal deadline, so long as the terrorist group met a list of conditions that included making a total break from al-Qaeda.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELBiden said his hands were tied because of the Trump administration’s deal. What utter nonsense. He’s the president of the United States. He had plenty of options. He just didn’t care and now he’s playing the blame game.
Joe Biden tried to pass the blame off to Trump last week when he addressed the nation saying that the previous administration gave him a binary choice of either leaving by May 1 or adding more troops to the area. It was a bald-faced lie.
“I don’t know what planet he’s on,” Pompeo said, pointing out to anyone with a working brain that the Taliban didn’t increase attacks when Biden extended the May withdrawal deadline.
“Biden says there was an unconditional commitment to leave in May. That’s simply not true. Read the document. What we would have done is we would have continued to apply pressure.”
Our news media overall have been corrupted politically and so they never actually read the document. And if they did, they’re certainly not asking the administration any questions about Biden’s statements.
Doug London, an armchair former CIA counter-terrorism chief, accused Pompeo of ignoring politically “inconvenient” intelligence reports that foresaw what’s going on right now in Afghanistan.
Pompeo graduated #1 in his West Point class. I think he knows how to read intelligence reports.
The former secretary of state responded, saying he was very aware of intelligence reports that al-Qaeda was still strongly engaged in Afghanistan when he signed the Doha agreement.
“I never believed a thing they said,” Pompeo said of the Taliban’s vow to break from al-Qaeda. “It was a condition.” Leftists don’t understand this kind of stuff.
Pompeo underscored that the withdrawal deadline was “conditions-based,” and said that Trump and his administration in the second term would have provided a small military presence in Afghanistan beyond the May deadline, after the Taliban were shown to not be fulfilling their end of the agreement.
Former Trump national security advisors H.R. McMaster and John Bolton and current Trump haters have come out to blame Trump and Pompeo for contributing to what’s happening now in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over the country.
McMaster said the agreement signed by Pompeo was a “capitulation agreement” with the Taliban that pretty much guaranteed the Afghan military and the government’s collapse.
“The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves,” McMaster told journalist Bari Weiss.
On CNN, Bolton said that while Biden carries the primary responsibility for what’s happening in Afghanistan, Trump would have likely made the same mistakes. That’s a true Trump hater, folks, a man who reads into the future for events that never happened just so he can attack the man who fired his sorry arse.
Pompeo says critics like Bolton and the little hand grenade with ears McMaster miss the point completely. The Trump administration was committed to providing a deterrence structure that allowed the US to keep 2,500 troops down from 15,000 when Trump left office.
“We went from 15,000 troops to 2,500 troops and we still had order in Afghanistan,” he told the National Review. “There’s almost triple that number of American forces on the ground now and there’s complete chaos. So when someone asks ‘could you have maintained this?’ My response is ‘for six months after the agreement was signed we didn’t get a single American killed. We didn’t have a single Taliban attack on an American.'”
Pompeo acknowledged the Taliban continually broke the agreement while Trump was still president but understood that they would soon enough meet their obligations with troops still there and the threat of retaliation. Biden just said to get all troops out with no other contingencies planned.
“They broke the agreement a number of times: they moved forces where they weren’t supposed to move, they put certain elements of the Afghan forces at risk. And every time that happened, General Scotty Miller crushed them,” he told the outlet.
“We would call them and say ‘you did X, we responded with Y,’ stop doing X.’ And we modeled a deterrence mechanism that told the Taliban if you push the Americans under Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, there’ll be an enormous price to pay.”
The critics are trashing Trump to protect Biden, and meanwhile, thousands of American lives are at stake. What kind of people do that?
