Donald Trump’s peace deal, which Trump’s own NSA Adviser, HR McMaster called, “A surrender to the Taliban”, allowed the Taliban to attack our Afghan hosts and all of its citizens in exchange for the safety of our troops. Why shouldn’t we be surprised that Afghan territorial leaders, having their safety sold out for ours, made the same “don’t attack us and we’ll let you have the territory” deal that Trump made, and that their cities fell without a shot being fired? It’s little wonder that Afghans, who were able to see that they were sold down the river the moment the attacks continued on them after Trump’s Feb 2020 peace deal, and the moment Trump gave away 5 military bases and negotiated a release of 5,000 prisoners filled to the brim with terrorists, all without insisting that the Taliban comply with their side of the agreement to negotiate with the Afghan government, suffered a loss of morale. Considering all of that, it’s also little wonder why, in Feb 2020, we didn’t have the Afghans at the table negotiating with the Taliban. It’s much harder to sell out an ally when they’re sitting at the table right next to you, and much easier to tell them you’ve included a condition requiring the Taliban negotiate with them even when you have no intention of enforcing that condition.
However, It’s a large wonder why, even after the Taliban had no more than a cursory meeting with the Afghans in Sept 2020, that Trump would announce that he would pull the rest of our troops out “by Christmas” of 2020, when his own Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, explained to him that we were giving away the rest of our leverage and broadcasting to the Taliban that we were leaving regardless of whether or not they negotiated a peaceful compromise with the Afghans. Well, it’s a large wonder until you realize that it was an election year and that Trump needed a political win, a political win that the GOP attempted to scrub from its website on Sunday, Aug 15, 2021-the very moment scenes of chaos emerged from Kabul (The RNC said that page was taken down as a matter of “routine maintenance”). From an archive of that deleted page, the RNC bragged, “As part of the peace agreement, the Taliban and the Afghan government recently began historic peace talks which would end decades of war that Afghanistan has consumed. The negotiations will cover the terms of a "permanent ceasefire, the rights of women and minorities, and the disarmament of the country's many militia groups .” That page can be found here:
web.archive.org/...
However, here is what else is a large wonder: Why Joe Biden’s intelligence advisors, knowing all of the conditions mentioned, thought that the speed with which Afghanistan would eventually fall to the Taliban was a lower probability event than the near-certain eventuality it turned out to be? Was it the 300k size of the Afghan military force? Whatever the case, contingency planning was not nearly sufficient to avoid the chaos we are seeing now. Still, what Biden was left with was 2,500 troops, or a 79% drop in force size from the 12k troops we held before the Feb 2020 peace deal. He was left with the loss of 5 military bases that would’ve been helpful in accommodating a troop surge should he have decided that’s what was needed. Many Republicans are now acknowledging that Trump’s peace deal was problematic and are now, instead, asking, “Well, if Biden didn’t like the peace deal, then why didn’t he just change it?” And the realistic answer is, Change it with what? A troop and equipment surge that re-engages us in a war in which we now hold no territory and have to re-quire it along with possibly having to retake the 5 bases Trump gave up? When Biden says he had two choices, stay and re-engage in the war for an indefinite period of time, or continue the withdrawal, he is right as rain. Biden was left holding the bag in the same way that Trump’s equity and bondholders were left holding the bag during any of his multiple bankruptcies. And it should be no surprise that he and the GOP cut and ran away from his own peace deal the same way he cut and ran from our Afghan hosts. Trump’s peace deal can be found here: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Agreement-For-Bringing-Peace-to-Afghanistan-02.29.20.pdf
Even more than Democrats being outraged over the hypocritical and disingenuous rhetoric the GOP has been piling on Joe Biden, which has ranged from false social media memes suggesting that Biden didn’t have the decency to lower flags to half-staff to laughable calls for his resignation, they should be outraged by Trump’s disingenuous peace deal. And if they don’t think that a good portion of Trump’s peace deal was a sham, check out what the UN Security council had to say about efficacy of the deal in May 2020, less than 3 months after the deal was made. Pay particular attention to the report about Al-Queda and the Taliban, then go back and check out what Trump’s deal imagined the Taliban would be doing for us regarding Al-Queda. Then look us in the eye and tell us that Trump wasn’t selling us a bill of goods. UN Link is here:
https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N20/110/60/PDF/N2011060.pdf?OpenElement
And here is the real rub. The real on-going problem, as I see it, will be the military-industrial complex push, led by the McMasters and Cheney’s of the world, to try to re-engage us in endless future quagmires with McMaster, brilliant as he is, selling the quagmires on his four corollaries, one of which is “War is a contest of wills”. That sounds a lot like the blueprint for an endless war to me, and I bet Donald Trump felt the same way. At the end of the day, Trump and Biden supporters were on the SAME SIDE on this one: Lets please get out of Afghanistan. Biden supporters need to recognize that Trump’s greatest virtue was that he genuinely believed that our war and military expenditures were far too costly, and isn’t that what we’ve been arguing for years? We may not like the dishonesty in the peace deal or in Trump, but is peace no longer a virtue because Trump initiated it? And Trump supporters need to recognize that it is NOT Biden’s fault that the Afghan government fell as quickly as it did. Afghan fighters stopped fighting, whatever their reasons, and some of those reasons are directly related to Trump’s peace deal. Both need to recognize that there are casualties in a rescue operation, just as there was in the Berlin Airlift when the British and US Forces suffered approximately 100 casualties and 25 odd aircraft crashes in order to deliver over 2 tons of food and supplies to Germans who were in danger of being starved by the Soviet Blockade. The next day’s headlines didn’t read, “Why didn’t Truman See it Coming.” Ike didn’t run on a “Blood is on Truman’s Hand’s” campaign in ’52. Now, both sides agree that we needed to get out of Afghanistan, yet our generation can’t seem to take yes for an answer. The temptation for blame and rhetoric beats down any recognition of a shared goal being met, regardless of it’s messy implementation. Like the events of 1948 airlift, where the rescue and the sacrifice was the story, the same should hold true here.
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