As the Taliban re-clenches its iron fist around Afghanistan, new reporting sheds light on where the American exit from the country went wrong and why the U.S. military has had to scramble to evacuate diplomats and Afghans who aided in the war effort.
For H.R. McMaster, the decorated general who served as Donald Trump’s second national security advisor, the roots of the debacle trace back to an agreement former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed with the Taliban in February 2020.
“Our secretary of state, [Mike Pompeo] signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban. This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves,” McMaster said on Honestly with Bari Weiss, a podcast.
According to The New York Times, Pompeo was pressured by Trump to sign the agreement, even though many national security officials felt it was rushed and relied too heavily on a mere promise from the Taliban not to harbor terrorists. The Taliban also pledged to negotiate with the Afghan government.
To commemorate the deal, Pompeo traveled to Qatar to appear in a photo-op besides Taliban Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. The move was seen to legitimatize Baradar.
This week, Pompeo called the Taliban ‘butchers.’
Mark T. Esper, one of Trump’s defense secretaries, also cast aspersions on the deal, telling CNN that it was undermined by Trump’s desire to score a political victory by bringing troops home before he faced re-election.
CNN describes how the pact, formally dubbed “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan,” played out:
But the deal didn’t bring about peace.
Following the agreement, violence in Afghanistan grew to its highest levels in two decades and the Taliban increased their control of wider swaths of the country. By June of this year, the Taliban contested or controlled an estimated 50% to 70% of Afghan territory outside of urban centers, according to a United Nations Security Council report.
Esper also levied blame on President Joe Biden, saying he ultimately “owns” the chaotic exit from Afghanistan.
Details in a new report from The Wall Street Journal underscore that point. Biden has repeatedly said that the Taliban’s rapid resurgence was an unforeseen event and that the intelligence community indicated that he had more time to remove Americans and refugees from Afghanistan.
But according to the Journal, a cable signed by 23 members of the U.S. embassy staff in Kabul “warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces, and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up an evacuation.”
The cable was sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken via a dissent channel. A State Department spokesman confirmed that Blinken received and read the cable. Some of its recommendations became U.S. policy, according to the Journal.
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported, ” classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military.”
The Times added:
…the warnings in the newly described reports raise questions about why Biden administration officials, and military planners in Afghanistan, seemed ill-prepared to deal with the Taliban’s final push into Kabul, including a failure to ensure security at the main airport and rushing thousands more troops back to the country to protect the United States’ final exit.
As of Thursday, thousands of Afghans are trying to board outbound international flights at the Kabul airport, but the Taliban has repelled many of them with violence. The Washington Post explains:
Several people said Thursday they had received confusing signals from the United States about how exactly they were supposed to leave, citing emails from the State Department urging them to go the airport, only to find there was no one to receive them or to answer their questions on how to board flights.