It’s getting hard to keep any of it straight. Was he lying about wanting to get out the whole time? Or did he lie just for the purpose of winning the election after which he planned to lie some more about staying in? Or, in this telling was he “playing” the Afghans in order to keep a counterinsurgency force in the country which he, of course, lied about wanting to do.
It’s exhausting. But I would certainly take anything this hack says with a grain of salt, no matter what it is. He’s nuts:
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.
Miller said the president’s public promise to finish withdrawing U.S. forces by May 1, as negotiated with the Taliban, was actually a “play” that masked the Trump administration’s true intentions: to convince Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to quit or accept a bitter power-sharing agreement with the Taliban, and to keep some U.S. troops in Afghanistan for counterrorism missions.
In a conversation this week with Defense One, Miller revealed that while serving as the top counterterrorism official on the National Security Council in 2019, he commissioned a wargame that determined that the United States could continue to conduct counterterrorism in Afghanistan with just 800 American military personnel on the ground. And by the end of 2020, when he was acting defense secretary, Miller asserted, many Trump administration officials expected that the United States would be able to broker a new shared government in Afghanistan composed primarily of Taliban officials. The new government would then permit U.S. forces to remain in country to support the Afghan military and fight terrorist elements.
That plan never happened, in part because Trump lost his reelection bid in November. And at least one other former senior Trump administration official questioned Miller’s retelling. But in revealing it, Miller challenged recent assertions that Trump is to blame for setting up this week’s chaotic scenes unfolding across Kabul. Miller alleged that despite Trump’s frequent public pledges to end the Afghanistan war and bring home all U.S. troops, many senior national security officials in his administration believed a total withdrawal was not inevitable. 213Q
The spectre of Trump’s public comments has lingered into the new administration. On Monday, President Joe Biden asserted that Trump’s February 2020 deal with the Taliban and subsequent troop withdrawals, along with the American public’s growing desire to end the war, left the new president just two choices: send thousands of U.S. troops back into Afghanistan for a fruitless mission or completely and quickly withdraw.
In December, Miller touched down in Afghanistan to formally discuss with Afghan leaders the end of the U.S. troop presence. The response of then-President Ashraf Ghani surprised Miller. “I expected hostility,” he recalled in conversation with Defense One on Saturday. “Instead, he was gracious and respectful. He talked about the sacrifices of the Americans. He thanked the Gold Star families. He said, ‘You have done so much’.”
But the tone of the discussions changed when Miller met with Ghani’s vice president, Amrullah Saleh, who had also served in key intelligence roles over the years.
“He came in and just talked about the threat,” said Miller. “Essentially, the message was: ‘This is going to be bad. And if this happens, al-Qaeda is going to be back’.”
The U.S. delegation and their Afghan counterparts didn’t talk strategy or go into any details about what lay ahead during the meetings, Miller said. The participants already seemed to know the bleak facts. “It would not have been appropriate to say ‘Is your Army going to collapse?’ But of course we were all thinking that.”
Insane…