The best spin Pompeo can now put on it is that a reelected Trump would have abandoned it.
The best spin Pompeo can now put on it is that a reelected Trump would have abandoned it.
U p until things recently turned into a five-alarm debacle in Afghanistan, former president Donald Trump’s major criticism was that his successor wasn’t getting out of Afghanistan fast enough. He derided President Biden for extending the withdrawal deadline. Put aside that the total U.S. pullout, under any circumstances, would have eviscerated the counter-terrorism mission that continues to be essential — namely, denying anti-American jihadists sanctuary from and operational partnership with the host regime. As we now see, the May 1 date, on which Trump agreed in a formal February 2020 agreement with the Taliban, would have been even more reckless than Biden’s September 11 deadline (which has effectively become August 31 — i.e., next week).
That is the reality. And it is why one is so underwhelmed by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s attempt to defend the Trump–Taliban agreement, laid out in our Jack Crowe’s report, based on an interview with Pompeo.
The former secretary’s bottom line is that the agreement was a starting point — a single step in a “millennial project,” not an end point. Let’s leave aside that that is not how the agreement reads. The main problem, of course, is that even if Pompeo saw things that way, his commander in chief did not. Trump wanted out. He wasn’t concerned about conditions on the ground.
As the Taliban tighten their grip, we are seeing why solid national-security officials, such as Pompeo, were worried about a premature withdrawal. They were wedged, however, between the boss’s populist “forever wars” nonsense and their own better judgment.
Pompeo does not even attempt to defend some of the worst aspects of the agreement (which I have previously detailed): The Trump administration’s cutting the U.S.-backed Afghan government out while negotiating directly with the Taliban; the U.S. concession to refer to the Taliban as “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” which reflected their self-identification as a sharia regime-in-waiting (the State Department’s lip service about not recognizing this “Emirate” while repeatedly indulging the Taliban’s insistence on being referred to that way is very weak); and the astonishing American acquiescence in the Taliban’s demand that 5,000 prisoners be released — when we knew that many of the jihadists thus sprung would inevitably return to the battle being waged by the Taliban and its terrorist allies to defeat U.S.-backed Afghan forces and take over the country.
Pompeo claims that the agreement provided for a “conditions-based” withdrawal, and that if the Taliban violated the agreement, the U.S. withdrawal would not have happened under Trump. But this is defied by the facts.
The former secretary does not dispute that the Taliban repeatedly violated the agreement. Yet, while that was happening, the Trump administration responded with a dramatic drawdown. Our force level plummeted from over 13,000 in February 2020 (when the agreement was signed) to around 8,000 by that summer, and then down to 2,500 (perhaps 3,500 based on an estimate of troops supporting classified operations) by the end of the Trump administration.
Pompeo argues that in some specific instances when the Taliban violated the agreement, they were subjected to fierce U.S. military attacks, led by General Scott Miller. Yes, but if we’re going to assess how much of a deterrent this was, we must weigh it against what the Taliban were to glean from our stark force reductions, even as the Taliban prosecuted their offensive throughout the country.
Regardless of what aggressive action the Taliban took, the U.S. pulled out thousands of our troops. And throughout the drawdown, the commander in chief publicly chided his own advisers that our troops should not be there at all. As the Taliban persisted in their military campaign, President Trump insisted in his political campaign that U.S. forces were being pulled out even faster than they actually were.
Does it seem to you like the Taliban were deterred?
Pompeo’s emphasis on the agreement’s purported “conditions-based” U.S. withdrawal suffers from another deep flaw: There were no metrics on Taliban compliance with their illusory promises to break with and suppress al-Qaeda. In fact, the agreement did not even specify a Taliban commitment not to attack U.S. forces. That grudging condition was apparently tucked away in nonpublic annexes to the agreement, as the Trump-appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, told the Senate in March 2020. (See Congressional Research Service Report, p.1, n.4.)
Having previously been CIA director, Secretary Pompeo, as he explains, was extraordinarily well-informed about the Taliban and its fellow jihadist allies — al-Qaeda and the Haqqani group. Not surprisingly, he says he did not believe anything the Taliban said. I’m sure that’s true. But then . . . why make an agreement with them at all?
More to the point, why make an agreement under circumstances in which the Taliban refused to make written, public commitments not to attack Americans, and when Pompeo knew they were not serious about their commitments in any event? And why make an agreement stipulating to a total pullout if, as Pompeo says, he anticipated a modest continuing U.S. presence?
On the force-level point, Pompeo observes that we were keeping “order in Afghanistan” although we had drawn down to 2,500 troops. Against the tide of opinion from NATO allies and the Afghanistan Study Group, Pompeo asserts that a “small footprint” of roughly that size would have sufficed because it would have kept the Afghan forces up and running — artillery, air support, and intelligence. This, he maintains, would have preserved a security environment in which not a single American was killed in the months after the agreement.
This is wholly unconvincing.
Americans were not targeted after the agreement was signed because it stipulated that the United States would leave by May 1, 2021. That is exactly what the Taliban wanted, so why would they give us a reason to reconsider? Moreover, to convince the Taliban that Trump was serious, his administration deeply reduced forces as the agreement required. (Unlike the Taliban’s vague commitments, the agreement made our burdens concrete and measurable.)
We were able to get down to 2,500 troops, while sustaining no attacks, because the Taliban knew we were leaving. They also figured out that their stepped-up attacks on U.S.-backed Afghan forces — which the agreement gave them more resources to execute — made no difference to Trump. Whatever significance “conditions” may have held for the secretary of state, the president continued to pull out.
Pompeo insists that we can do effective counter-terrorism with a “small footprint” because that is what we do in such other dangerous countries as Somalia and Iraq. This argument echoes President Biden’s rationale for pulling out of Afghanistan, though Biden, like Trump, is more extreme in demanding a complete withdrawal — no in-country U.S. military presence at all. Yet, Pompeo and Biden are skipping past an inconvenient fact.
In Somalia and Iraq, we have cooperative military relationships with the host governments, which welcome U.S. assistance to fight jihadists. And even so, we still have a military presence: There are about 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq (though Biden plans to pull them out later this year); in Somalia, there were about 700 until Trump ordered them out at the end of his term, but our commanders are compensating by rotating in U.S. troops stationed elsewhere.
In Afghanistan, by contrast, the Taliban — our enemy and the terrorists’ ally — are assuming power. The challenge is not just that there will be al-Qaeda cells, as there are in many places. It is that they will have an operational partnership with the host regime. The last time that happened, from 1996 through 2001, we had no means of gathering vital intelligence, and al-Qaeda used its regime protection to conduct massive anti-American terrorist attacks — bombing our embassies in eastern Africa, nearly sinking a naval destroyer in Yemen, and ravaging our homeland in the 9/11 atrocities.
And let’s not overlook that most patent and stubborn fact: The Trump-Taliban agreement did not provide for the small footprint Pompeo suggests that he always envisioned keeping. It says all U.S. forces would leave. If we hadn’t agreed to a complete pullout, then the Taliban would not have signed. If we hadn’t proceeded with the pullout as promised, then the Taliban would have gone back to attacking Americans, making a drawdown to 2,500 impractical.
Finally, Pompeo says we could get away with a small force because that’s what would have been necessary for the Afghan armed forces to do the heavy lifting. But note what the agreement says (my italics):
The United States is committed to withdraw from Afghanistan all military forces of the United States, its allies, and Coalition partners, including all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel within fourteen (14) months following announcement of this agreement [i.e., by May 1, 2021].
The civilians to which this provision refers — in particular, the trainers, advisers, and supporting services personnel — are exactly what the Afghan armed forces needed in order to continue operating.
As I observed Monday (based on extensive Wall Street Journal reporting), when Biden decided to follow through on withdrawing our remaining forces, among the most quickly removed were “air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters.” Since we designed the Afghan military to be dependent on air power, the removal of U.S. civilian contractor support rendered that military unable to function. That’s why the Taliban’s final offensive succeeded so rapidly.
So . . . if the objective was to have a continuing American counterintelligence mission carried out by Afghan forces that are dependent on American civilian contractors providing technical support that the Afghans are unable to provide for themselves, then why would Pompeo’s State Department sign an agreement that called for the complete removal of the American civilian contractors?
Because it wasn’t Pompeo’s State Department. It was Trump’s. Left to his own devices, I have no doubt that the secretary would not have signed the agreement. Alas, it wasn’t his call, it was the president’s. Trump did not support the counter-terrorism mission that Pompeo knows is essential. The agreement reflects Trump’s deeply flawed position. That is why it is indefensible. That is also why the best spin Pompeo can now put on it is that a reelected Trump would have abandoned it.
PHOTOS: Fall of Afghanistan