In Wichita this week, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made fun of 18-year-old Greta Thunberg and joked about climate change, which is always good for a giggle, especially with California on fire. He also suggested that if only Donald Trump were still in office, our withdrawal from Afghanistan would have gone very differently.
That other Republicans are criticizing Biden’s implementation of Trump’s deal is one thing. But Pompeo personally oversaw the Trump administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal discussions with Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar, whom the CIA had arrested in 2010. He’d been in a Pakistani prison until Trump got him out two years ago.
So it’s a little bit stunning to watch Pompeo accuse Biden of “leading with weakness” by finishing the troop withdrawal that Trump planned to accomplish even more quickly. We do believe the former Kansas congressman’s boast that he had “fun” telling Baradar that “we knew exactly where his house was.” That sounds just like him.
But what brass, blaming “the fact that we didn’t make clear to the Taliban that if they chased us out of town, we were going to chase them back into their town” for the Taliban’s rapid takeover in Afghanistan this week. “This was a horrific set of foreign policy.”
Right, if only Biden had bared his teeth like Pompeo says he did, then our exit would have been painless.
Only, Trump undermined the success of his own team’s efforts by bringing more and more U.S. troops home without any concessions from the Taliban. The Taliban was supposed to negotiate a peace agreement with the Afghan government, and when that didn’t happen, the withdrawal continued anyway. It’s a little bit stunning to watch Pompeo accuse Biden of “leading with weakness” by finishing the troop withdrawal that Trump planned to accomplish even more quickly.
Most Americans have wanted us out of Afghanistan for some time. And if Barack Obama had listened to Joe Biden in 2009, the last dozen years of our war there would never have happened. That does not mean what’s going on right now, with those who helped us left trapped and in danger, can be defended.
No, what we watched in Afghanistan this week was stomach-turning, and for those of us who’ve been able to turn away from such scenes for the last 20 years, it was also more unexpected than it should have been. That we didn’t get our friends out ahead of the Taliban takeover is infuriating, and that women and girls are in hiding now is one reason that no American president wanted to be the one to walk away.
But even among Republicans, Pompeo’s confidence that this withdrawal would have gone very differently under the previous administration is not universally shared.
Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday that “my concern was that President Trump, by continuing to want to withdraw American forces out of Afghanistan, undermined the agreement, which is why in the fall when he was calling for a return of US forces by Christmas, I objected and formally wrote a letter to him, a memo based on recommendations from the military chain of command and my senior civilian leadership that we not go further — that we not reduce below 4,500 troops unless and until conditions were met by the Taliban. Otherwise, we would see a number of things play out, which are unfolding right now in many ways.”
Trump, you remember, even invited the Taliban to Camp David — and only disinvited them after a suicide car bomb in Kabul killed an American soldier, Army Sgt. First Class Elis Angel Barreto Ortiz, a recipient of the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star Medal.
Pompeo pushed hard for the peace plan, which put him at odds with then-national security adviser John Bolton, who the New York Times reported at the time “argued that Mr. Trump could keep his campaign pledge to draw down forces without getting in bed with killers bathed in American blood.”
Yet in Wichita, we heard the chief proponent of this deal argue that Biden is weak for failing to stand up to the same Taliban that just a minute ago, Pompeo was talking up as our trusted partner in counterterrorism. And the same Taliban that both Trump and Biden failed to hold to their commitments under the deal.
The execution of the long overdue withdrawal has been ugly. Whether Trump could have somehow done it both faster and more gently is unlikely, but impossible to disprove now. A statesman would have acknowledged that, and would maybe even have shown some humility, given his role in what’s playing out in Afghanistan. But that Mike Pompeo did neither is no surprise.
