Harris’ campaign is reminding Trump that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was done as he negotiated with the Taliban and that Biden honored the agreement.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is reminding Americans that the 2020 agreement to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan was made by former President Donald Trump with the Taliban, as the Republican candidate continues to repeat his criticisms of the chaotic U.S. troop withdrawal during President Joe Biden’s first year in office.
August 26 marked the third anniversary of the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate, outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport in Afghanistan, which killed 13 U.S. service members, injured 18 others, and killed around 170 Afghans.
During a speech in Detroit to commemorate the day, Trump blamed the “humiliation in Afghanistan” on both Harris and Biden.
In a response shared first with CBS News, Harris’s campaign is using Trump’s announcement and the abrupt cancellation, five years ago, of a Camp David meeting with Taliban leaders to highlight the role that Trump’s agreement with the Taliban played in how the withdrawal had to be conducted.
The Harris and Walz campaign argues that Trump’s deal with the Taliban created an “almost impossible” deadline and left the Biden-Harris administration with “no plan for an orderly withdrawal, just a dangerous and costly disaster.”
“Trump is brazenly attacking the Vice President because he hopes to fool the country into forgetting that his own actions put troops in harm’s way,” Harris campaign national security spokesman Morgan Finkelstein told CBS News. “Trump wanted to bring the Taliban to Camp David just days before September 11; think about that. He made a bad deal with the very people who violently took Afghanistan and led to the collapse of the Afghan government.”
On September 7, 2019, Trump tweeted that a meeting with the Taliban had been canceled after a U.S. soldier was killed in an attack by the terrorist group. Months later, in February 2020, Trump signed an agreement with the Taliban to pave the way for a significant reduction of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of that year, in exchange for assurances from the Taliban that the country would not be used for terrorist activities.
However, Taliban attacks on Afghan forces continued. Trump’s former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, referred to the agreement as a “surrender deal with the Taliban” during a podcast interview.
The attack at Kabul airport occurred during Biden’s efforts to evacuate U.S. and Afghan soldiers from Afghanistan, part of a long-standing goal shared by both him and Trump to officially end the prolonged war. House Republicans are currently investigating the Biden administration’s withdrawal.
Biden harshly criticized Trump’s deal with the Taliban but ultimately upheld it, extending the withdrawal deadline by a couple of months to have the troops out before September 11, 2021, in order to avoid further military escalation in the country.
“Perhaps it’s not what I would have negotiated, but it was a deal made by the U.S. government, and that means something,” Biden said in April 2021.
Source – laopinion.com
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