Trump officials scramble for distance from his Taliban deal
(WaPo)
That's pretty funny.
Trump pushed forward with a significant drawdown despite the advice of his advisers (including Miller’s predecessor as defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, whom Trump fired shortly after Esper wrote a memo opposing such a move).
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...Esper said Trump undermined the agreement by continuing to withdraw troops despite the Taliban not living up to its end of the bargain, which was signed in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020. And he explicitly tied that the deal to what happened in recent days.
“Otherwise,” Esper said to CNN of his advice to Trump, “we would see a number of things play out, which are unfolding right now in many ways.”
“Our secretary of state [Mike Pompeo] signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” [46-1 national security adviser H.R.] McMaster told Bari Weiss. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”
McMaster’s successor as national security adviser, John Bolton, has offered similar comments...
A lower-profile official to speak out is Lisa Curtis, an expert on South and Central Asia who served on Trump’s National Security Council for four years, including when the Taliban deal was signed.
She told the AP, “The Doha agreement was a very weak agreement, and the U.S. should have gained more concessions from the Taliban.” She said the deal was too heavily weighted in the Taliban’s favor and undermined Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who ultimately fled the country this weekend.
In another interview, she cited the deal forcing Ghani to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners who likely played a role in taking over the country.
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...Trump’s negotiations with the Taliban weren’t huge news outside foreign policy circles because the war wasn’t front-of-mind at the time. About the closest this got to being big news was when Trump briefly invited the Taliban to Camp David in 2019 around the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, before reversing course amid a bipartisan outcry.
Oh, I remember the Camp David invite!
But now the situation has deteriorated thanks to a withdrawal that Trump, by his own estimation just a couple of months ago, forced upon Biden. “I started the process. All the troops are coming home. They couldn’t stop the process,” Trump said, adding: “They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”
