Biden has been saying all along that he was pinned in to withdrawing from Afghanistan based on Trump’s agreement with the Taliban. But stunningly the AP points out how untrue Biden’s claims are and gives us the facts of what really happened:
As President Donald Trump’s administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, he optimistically proclaimed that “we think we’ll be successful in the end.” His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, asserted that the administration was “seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation.”
Eighteen months later, President Joe Biden is pointing to the agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, as he tries to deflect blame for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in a blitz. He says it bound him to withdraw U.S. troops, setting the stage for the chaos engulfing the country.
But Biden can go only so far in claiming the agreement boxed him in. It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.
Skipping ahead to the nitty gritty:
U.S. officials made clear at the time that the agreement was conditions-based and the failure of intra-Afghan peace talks to reach a negotiated settlement would have nullified the requirement to withdraw.
One day before the Doha deal, a top aide to chief U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad said the agreement was not irreversible, and “there is no obligation for the United States to withdraw troops if the Afghan parties are unable to reach agreement or if the Taliban show bad faith” during negotiations.
Those negotiations were intended to begin within a month of the deal being signed but were delayed amid disputes between the Taliban and the Afghan government over prisoner releases. Amid fits and starts, the negotiations had not produced any outcome by the time Biden announced his withdrawal decision in April. Nor have they done so since.
Just as Trump said, it was ‘conditions-based’ and there was no obligation to pull troops out if the Taliban and Afghan government couldn’t come to an agreement.
Add to that how Trump made clear to the Taliban that he’d rain fire and brimstone on the Taliban if they tried any ‘bad stuff’.
So what’s really going on here is that Biden wanted to bring our troops even though he wasn’t obligated to do so, and didn’t care about the consequences of a hasty and bass ackwards pullout. Now that the world is stuck with another country controlled by Islamic terrorists, Biden lies and tries to blame Trump for his catastrophic failures. He is truly pathetic.