Pompeo pushes back Biden who blames Trump for withdrawal from Afghanistan: we ‘maintained deterrence’

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Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pushed back on the Biden administration on Friday for blaming the Trump administration’s Taliban deal for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Pompeo said the Trump administration had a “conditional” deal with the Taliban, which was not the same as the plan being pursued by President Biden.

BIDEN AND TRUMP CAMPS PLAY BLAME AS SITUATION IN AFGHANISTAN CONTINUES TO DETERIORATE

MIKE POMPEO: We were clear with the Taliban that we had that understanding, but you were going to live up to it. And we had a condition-based withdrawal plan and we executed it. We’ve gone from about 15,000 to just over 2,500. And in the last 13 months of our administration, we haven’t had a single American attacked or a single American killed.

It wasn’t because of the piece of paper, it was all of the deals. This is because the Taliban understood that if they acted against the Americans and took action inconsistent with what they promised to do, we would respond and we did. We have done this several times. When they pushed us and the Trump administration, we responded with American might and might, and we made it clear to the Taliban that deterrence was going to be maintained. The difference was when the Biden administration came in, when the Taliban pushed, they pulled out. They showed weakness. The Taliban coiled him up. They put our military in an incredibly difficult position because they were not ready to defend the conditions and then decided to withdraw when the conditions were not right.

President Trump wanted to get all of our people out. No one disputes that the right thing to do was to bring these people home. But we never found the right conditions to carry out what President Biden chose to do. President Trump wanted everyone to leave from January 2017. We never found the right conditions to be able to do so. So we withdrew from 15,000 to about 8,600 and then back to about 4,500, each time making sure we understood that we had the deterrence maintained, that we were ordered to protect the Americans. And we did it every day.

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