Republicans Making Afghanistan Major Campaign Issue

Needing a campaign issue, the Trump campaign is making Biden’s calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan a major issue by attempting to shift the blame to Vice President Kamala Harris. "Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world", Trump intoned. JD Vance made Harris the commander in chief of the military in 2021 when he told an Erie, Pa., audience that Harris can "go to hell" for falling "asleep at the wheel" and having "those 13 Americans lose their lives." Congress joined in. Having waited three years so his Benghazi-like show trial would be just before the election, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul has subpoenaed Secretary of State Antony Blinken to testify about the Afghanistan pullout.

We have not a word of defense for Biden's catastrophic mishandling of the withdrawal; we’ve tacked on contemporaneous articles below as reminders of that – proof, if you like. They are filled with outrage and are in no need of revision.

Children hold Taliban flags as they celebrate the third anniversary of the withdrawal of U.S.-led troops from Afghanistan.

But Trump makes no acknowledgement of his own responsibility. As you will find in these articles and here, it was Trump who made the decision to withdraw the troops from Afghanistan – even bypassing and undercutting the Afghan government by dealing directly with the Taliban. The U.S. signed a peace agreement with them at the end of February, 2020, in Doha, Qatar, which provided for the removal of all U.S. and other NATO troops by May 1, 2021, in exchange for a pledge only that the Taliban would keep al-Qaeda out of areas under Taliban control.

As this page commented then, "There is a fundamental absurdity to a negotiated settlement that requires trusting the Taliban" yet Trump in the preceding September of 2019 even had a secret plan to bring the Taliban, who had killed so many of our troops, to Camp David to negotiate the agreement. Even Vice President Mike Pence spoke up against the appalling idea.

But the fantasy continued. Astonishingly, in the final agreement Trump negotiators acceded to the release of 5,000 Taliban from prison in Pakistan as part of a "confidence building measure". In his memoir just published, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a celebrated major combat general in Iraq who served for a year as Trump's national security adviser, believes that the huge influx of prisoners ready to fight again contributed significantly to the collapse of Afghanistan in 2021 as the Taliban suddenly swept the country. Getting nothing but a false promise in return, Trump gave "pretty much everything the Taliban wanted...which was a terrible mistake in those negotiations", said former defense secretary Leon Panetta. At a rally in November of last year, Donald Trump bragged that a Taliban leader was nice to him, called him “your excellency”.

Faced with leaving the White House, Trump realized that the May 1, 2021, withdrawal date would give Joe Biden the credit for leaving Afghanistan. Trump wanted that to be his legacy. On November 9, just six days after the election, John McEntee, formerly Trump's "body man" who had become one of his most-favored aides, handed retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, briefly a senior advisor to the acting secretary of defense, a piece of paper with a few notes scribbled on it, Axios reported. He explained: "This is what the president wants you to do."

1. Get us out of Afghanistan.

2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.

3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.

4. Get us out of Africa.

This became a one-page memo, with Trump's distinctive Sharpie signature, delivered by courier to Defense Secretary Christopher Miller's office two days later. All U.S. forces were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by January 15, 2021, just two months away. Keith Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general and a member of the Trump administration at the time, said after seeing the order that the idea was “a tremendous disservice to the nation” and implementing it would be “catastrophic.”And yet Trump, who would fault Biden for leaving billions of dollars worth of military equipment behind, maintains to this day that “We were going to do it with dignity and strength", despite the chaos the memo attests. In fact, there are no indications that Trump or his administration made any plans or moves in preparation for the May 1 agreement. He just left the entire mess to Biden.

Worse, he sabtotaged him. The Trump administration agreed to an initial drawdown from 13,000 to 8,600 troops by July 2020, followed by a full withdrawal by the May 1, 2021, deadline. But then Trump in the preceding November gave the order to leave Biden with only a token force of 2,500 troops, a drawdown to be effected by January 15, just five days before Biden was to take office. Why was that not the signal to the Taliban that they could start their sweep with impunity?

Trump disavows any involvement now, but in late June of 2021, just weeks before Biden's panicked evacuation near the end of August, and showing no clue of what was to come, Trump went to Ohio to stage his first rally since leaving office, where he tried to take credit for leaving Afghanistan:

"By the way, I started the process. All the troops are coming back now. They couldn't stop the process. Twenty-one years is enough, don't we think? Twenty-one years. They couldn't stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process".

We wanted to set the record straight about Trump and Afghanistan before leading into our articles from then which show Biden's equal incompetence. The first article below is from June 2021, two months before the end-August debacle which clearly foresaw what Biden did not. The second article is simultaneous with the evacuation. Both leave Biden with no excuses:

Jun 17 2021

As in Vietnam, as in Iraq, as in Syria, the United States has left behind the thousands who helped our military in Afghanistan. In his headlong rush to pull out the troops, pressing for mid-July rather than his original September 11 deadline, President Biden seems only at this last minute to have discovered that we are entirely unprepared to rescue the interpreters, drivers, cultural advisers, security guards, many of whom have been embedded with our troops, living with them at remote firebases, risking their lives on combat patrols, and now face inhuman retribution by the Taliban for their having rendered essential service to the U.S. (Continue here)

Aug 22 2021

Left-wing cable news and punditry cannot bring itself to admit the colossal failing of President Biden's evacuation of Afghanistan, but its damage will endure throughout his term in the White House. He

postured to show resoluteness, setting deadlines where there should have been none, and turned to his priority, the two gigantic bills in Congress. He seemed oblivious to what was coming at him, as we wrote in June. (Continue here)