[ New York Post ] I ran Team Trump’s Afghan withdrawal — Biden’s attempt to blame us is just sad
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.
We handed our entire plan to the incoming Biden administration during the lengthy transition. The new team simply wasn’t interested.
Everything changed when the new commander in chief declared that US forces would leave Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, pushing back the Trump administration’s timetable by four months. Crucially, he didn’t condition the withdrawal on continued adherence to the agreed-upon stipulations. It would be an unconditional pullout with an arbitrary date based on pure symbolism — and set in stone.
With an unmovable withdrawal date in place, Team Biden showed no appreciation for ground-level intelligence reporting, which was largely rendered irrelevant. Just this week, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, claimed the security situation in Afghanistan “unfolded at unexpected speed.”
That is a shocking statement to hear from one of our nation’s most senior national-security officials. No one should have been the slightest bit surprised that when relieved of any conditions or obligations, the Taliban could and would overrun the whole country in the absence of US military power.
DPA Notes: We are not even surprised that there was originally a good and simple plan, and it was totally thrown aside because of politics and Democrats’ tendency to play on symbolism, good feelings and manipulation of public perceptions….
There should be NO REASONS United States cannot withdraw in a secured manner when they are the most powerful military in the world, have absolute control over the skies in Afghanistan, with troops on the ground, superb intelligence and have the entire momentum under control on every single condition of the withdrawal: including and not exclusively, the withdrawal dates, the conditions, the time, the place, the method, etc…
No Americans should have died, and no American should have been left behind (according to multiple reports, there are still Americans stranded in Afghanistan, including multiple school kids.)