Wasn’t worth the mention….
As usual?
It was a President Trump fantasy…..
And it was N OT helpful to Joe Biden…..
Some former senior Trump officials now call that agreement fatally flawed, saying it did little more than provide cover for a pullout that Mr. Trump was impatient to begin before his re-election bid. They also say it laid the groundwork for the chaos unfolding now in Kabul.
“Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said of Mr. Pompeo during a podcast interview with the journalist Bari Weiss on Wednesday. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”
And in an interview with CNN on Wednesday, former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said that, while President Biden “owns” the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan, Mr. Trump had earlier “undermined” the agreement through his barely disguised impatience to exit the country with little apparent regard for the consequences. That included an October 2020 declaration by Mr. Trump that he wanted the 5,000 American troops then in Afghanistan home by Christmas.
Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Pompeo has responded to such criticism with contrition. Instead, they have attacked Mr. Biden for what they call his disastrous execution of the pullout they set in motion.
After Mr. Trump moved thousands of troops out of Afghanistan during his last year in office, Mr. Biden inherited just 2,500 troops in the country. Mr. Biden has cited the U.S. commitment in Doha to remove all remaining forces by May of this year, a deadline he did not meet, as a key factor in his decision to continue the withdrawal….
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Nor is there evidence that top Trump officials prioritized planning for the eventual evacuation of Americans, or of Afghans who might be subject to Taliban reprisals for working with the United States….
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Nothing in the document mandated the Taliban to stop its military campaign, refrain from capturing Kabul or agree to an actual power-sharing deal with the Afghan government.
Nor did Trump officials place any public emphasis on the need to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies.
Asked about Mr. Trump’s statements, and whether he was aware of discussions about such evacuations, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton suggested there had been none.
“It’s striking how Biden’s decision-making here so closely follows the Trump pattern,” Mr. Bolton said. “Biden wanted out; he apparently didn’t want to be bothered with details that might have thwarted or slowed down executing his decision. So he left. Very Trumpian.”…
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Ms. Haley, who played no role in the Trump administration’s talks with the Taliban, took aim at Mr. Biden. But, wittingly or not, she also incriminated Mr. Trump and Mr. Pompeo — all potential rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
“Negotiating with the Taliban,” Ms. Haley said, “is like dealing with the devil.”
President Donald Trump’s top national security officials never intended to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, according to new statements by Chris Miller, Trump’s last acting defense secretary….
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