Kash Patel, a Pentagon official in the Trump administration, offers a piece in the New York Post that debunks President Biden’s claim that he inherited Trump’s plan for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
President Joe Biden has sought to place blame for the shocking dénouement in Afghanistan on the situation he “inherited” from the Trump administration. What a sad-sack attempt at blame-shifting. Team Trump’s withdrawal plan was sound. What proved catastrophic were Biden’s changes to that plan.
I’m intimately familiar with former President Donald Trump’s Afghanistan strategy. In November 2020, I was named chief of staff at the Pentagon, where one of my primary responsibilities was to wind down the forever war in Afghanistan.
Trump instructed me to arrange a conditions-based, methodical exit plan that would preserve the national interest. The plan ended up being fairly simple: The Afghan government and the Taliban were both told they would face the full force of the US military if they caused any harm to Americans or American interests in Afghanistan.
Next, both parties would negotiate to create an interim-joint government, and both sides had to repudiate al Qaeda. Lastly, a small special-operations force would be stationed in the country to take direct action against any terrorist threats that arose. When all those conditions were met — along with other cascading conditions — then a withdrawal could, and did, begin.
We successfully executed this plan until Jan. 20, 2021. During this interval — when there were no US casualties in Afghanistan — President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban conducted multiple rounds of negotiations, and al Qaeda was sidelined. The result was a successful drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan to 2,500, the lowest count since the dawn of the War on Terror.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
I ran Trump's Afghan withdrawal — Biden's attempt to blame us is sad (nypost.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment