Here was Trump just two months ago:
“The Taliban is the enemy. I dealt with the leader of the Taliban … this is a tough, hardened person that’s been fighting us for many years, and we’re using them now to protect us? Look what happened with their protection, 100 people — much more, they say, than 100 people — were killed and 13 of our incredible military were killed, and that’s just the beginning.”
Trump also sought to defend the cease-fire deal his administration forged with the Taliban in February 2020. He argued that it did not commit the US to a firm withdrawal date, contrary to Biden’s claims.
“We had plenty of time. They [the Taliban] weren’t gonna move. We had them under total control,” he said. “We had the airplanes, we had the Air Force, they had nothing … There was no reason to expedite. I could have taken two years, three years to get [US forces] out. We were gonna get ‘em out fast, but … we were in no rush. We controlled everything, and they were afraid to move.”
“They wouldn’t have done a thing without my approval,” Trump went on. “Everything they did was conditions-based, and the biggest condition [was] you can’t kill Americans. And they can go back to their civil war after we’re gone, they can do whatever they want to do, but you can’t ever kill Americans and you can never come to our homeland, and he [Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Baradar] knew what was going to happen if they ever did it.”
“He didn’t do anything, and then they took over and we ran out and we’ve just destroyed the image of our great country, of our incredible warriors — and they are incredible warriors, but they need leadership at the top and they don’t have it … He talks like a tough guy, and he’s not a tough guy. He’s just the opposite and the world knows it.”
It’s painful to try to deconstruct that pile of rhetorical offal, but I’ll give it a go.
Actually, Trump had one brief conversation with the leader of the Taliban after the deal ws already signed. The negotiating was done by the state department, overseen by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump’s main contribution to the talks was to invite them to Camp David so he could hold a surrender to the Taliban ceremony on September 11th. Thankfully, they talked him out of it.
He was the one who drew down troop levels to 2500 before he left office, in anticipation of a May withdrawal without any plan at all. In fact, he had been agitating to leave before the end of 2020:
The May 1st deadline was never seen as a loose date. Biden was able to get the Taliban to agree not to kill any Americans for an extra couple of months, but the small force of 2500 would have been in great danger if either Trump or Biden had just ignored it as Trump is suggesting he would have done. There would had to be an escalation of troops into the country and a continuation of the war. Trump is very dumb but I’m sure he knows this. He is just lying.
He says that everything he did was conditions based. True. The conditions were, as he says, that they could not kill Americans and could not attack the US homeland. They did not do either of those things. So his conditions were met. I don’t know what he’s talking about.
Trump’s tough talk was always seen as ridiculous because it was. Nobody took him seriously at all. He likes to talk about how he kept the world from nuclear disaster at the hands of North Korea but, of course, he simply gave North Korea even more room to develop their nuclear capability. I guess it could have been even worse but he proved to the world that he was sucker for grand pageants and would give up the store if they gave him one. And so they did.
President Obama chose the escalation path in 2009 in the vain hope that something would change and the Afghan project would finally work out. Trump mortgaged the future by making a deal he didn’t have to fulfill. This left Biden with the decision of whether to go back on his promise to get out by surging more troops into the country — the only option under the circumstances he was left with — or fulfilling the agreement, with all the risk that entailed (including the political risk of having the national security establishment and the political press react exactly as they have.) He chose to get out.
Trump is, as always, living in an alternate universe where facts and evidence don’t matter — where reality doesn’t matter. And it works:
Monica Crowley used to be a semi-rational conservative. She lost her mind a couple of years ago and hasn’t found her way back. She is representative of millions and millions of our fellow Americans.
Update: Here’s is a news report about Trump’s one conversation with Baradar in 2020:
Days after his administration signed a deal with the Taliban, President Donald Trump spoke to its co-founder and senior leader in a historic call — the first known conversation between an American president and the militant group that harbored the al Qaeda operatives responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
The conversation, after which Trump said he had a “very good” relationship with the Taliban’s co-founder, comes as that agreement to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and begin Afghan peace negotiations seems threatened by renewed violence and a dispute over releasing Taliban prisoners.
Trump spoke to Abdul Ghani Baradar, who serves as the group’s chief negotiator and also goes by Mullah Baradar, according to the militant group’s spokesperson, who said the call lasted 35 minutes.
Afterward, he told reporters that his “relationship” with Baradar is “very good … we had a good, long conversation today, and, you know, they want to cease the violence. They’d like to cease violence also.”
That’s not true. On Monday, the group’s spokesperson said attacks would resume on Afghan government forces but not U.S. forces, and Monday into Tuesday, there were 33 attacks in 16 provinces, killing six people and wounding 14, an Afghan Interior Ministry spokesperson told ABC News. Five Afghan policemen also were reportedly killed during an attack on a security checkpoint, according to Reuters.
In the last two days, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have urged calm and patience, saying some level of violence is still expected. But senior administration officials who briefed reporters last week specifically said that the Taliban would continue to keep levels of violence reduced, and it hasn’t.
Instead, the militant group seems focused on steering clear of the U.S. and pushing toward a full American withdrawal.
“If the United States honors the agreement concluded with us, then we will have positive future bilateral relations,” Baradar told Trump, according to his spokesperson.
According to the Taliban, Trump told Baradar, “It is a pleasure to talk to you. You are a tough people and have a great country, and I understand that you are fighting for your homeland. We have been there for 19 years, and that is a very long time, and withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan now is in the interest of everyone.”
The White House has not provided a readout of the call.
The agreement signed Saturday in Doha, Qatar, where chief U.S. negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, spent a year and a half negotiating with Baradar and others, lays out a full U.S. withdrawal, if the Taliban meets certain commitments — to engage in national peace negotiations with other Afghans and to prevent Afghanistan from being a safe haven to terror groups, specifically al Qaeda.
To kick that process off, the U.S. agreed to draw down its forces from approximately 13,000 to 8,600 and close its five major military bases within 135 days, while the Taliban agreed to meet an Afghan national delegation for negotiations on March 10. The militant group does not recognize the government of President Ashraf Ghani, decrying it as a U.S. puppet, but members of the government will join civil society, tribal leaders and women in a “personal” capacity to make up the Afghan national team.
But in the days since the agreement was signed by Baradar and Khalilzad, with Pompeo as a witness, there’s growing concern those intra-Afghan negotiations won’t happen.
In addition to the renewed violence against Afghan security forces, there is a discrepancy between the two agreements the administration signed over releasing Taliban prisoners.
The U.S.-Taliban agreement says the U.S. will facilitate the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government and up to 1,000 from the “other side” held by the Taliban, all of whom “will be released” by March 10, when negotiations begin. But a separate joint statement signed by the U.S. and Afghan governments on Saturday says only Ghani’s government will discuss the “feasibility of releasing significant numbers of prisoners on both sides,” without committing to any number or time frame.
“We have not made a commitment to release them. It’s a sovereign Afghan decision. We will discuss the question of prisoners as part of a peace deal, which has to be comprehensive,” Ghani told CNN on Sunday, refusing to release any Taliban prisoners — a key leverage point for the government and potential security risk — until those negotiations begin.
But the Taliban spokesperson said Monday the militant group will not participate in the negotiations until prisoners are released, leaving talks up in the air.
“Do not allow anyone to take actions that violate the terms of the agreement, thus embroiling you even further in this prolonged war,” Baradar told Trump in their call, according to his spokesperson — urging him to pressure Ghani to release prisoners.
Trump seemed to agree, reportedly telling Baradar that Pompeo “shall soon talk with Ashraf Ghani in order to remove all hurdles facing the intra-Afghan negotiations.”
Asked about Ghani’s hesitation, Trump said Ghani “may be reluctant,” then denounced the Afghan government for doing “very well with the United States for many years, far beyond military, if you look at all the money that we’ve spent.”
The State Department did not respond to questions about whether Pompeo called Ghani, but he was dismissive of Ghani’s statements on Monday: “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the habits of old days are hard to be break and this will be a bumpy road going forward,” he told Fox News in an interview.
Khalilzad, the chief U.S. negotiator seen with Baradar during the Trump call in a photo released by the Taliban, had been conducting some shuttle diplomacy between the rival Afghan political factions to push them along in their roles in the peace process. Pompeo alluded to that, saying the U.S. was “determined to get there” and push the process forward.
Amid all the issues, some Republicans in Congress have grown vocal about their opposition to the agreement.
The US did pressure the government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners.
The right’s rewriting of the events leading up to the events of the last couple of weeks have affected the coverage. And it’s not good. It’s going to take a herculean effort on the part of good-faith journalists and future historians to sort it out properly.