Pompeo Reveals What Trump Said to the Taliban During Afghanistan Withdrawal Negotiations

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President Joe Biden’s pullout of the U.S. military from Afghanistan has been met with criticism from all sides amid the Taliban’s blitz on the country’s cities.

Speaking to Martha MacCallum this week, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served under the Trump administration, slammed Biden over the way his administration has been handling the military pullout, which was first conceived by former President Donald Trump. Pompeo, the former CIA Director and Secretary of State, revealed what Trump told the Taliban in meetings and how the U.S. would withdraw its forces from the country.

Pompeo called the current situation the result of “poor planning, poor leadership and that the model of deterrence that the Trump Administration had in place.”

Trump’s proposal for the U.S. military to leave Afghanistan came amid the public’s fatigue with the war after some two decades of operations in the region – and agreements he made with the Taliban to withdraw in May were broken by the Biden administration, which pushed the date back to September, coinciding with the 20^th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2001.

In April, Trump called the Afghanistan withdrawal a “wonderful and positive thing to do,” but criticized Biden’s timeline for the move, noting that the President should have kept “as close to that schedule as possible,” referring to his agreements with the Taliban.

“I wish Joe Biden wouldn’t use September 11 as the date to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan, for two reasons. First, we can and should get out earlier. Nineteen years is enough, in fact, far too much and way too long,” Trump stated at the time, noting that “September 11 represents a very sad event and period for our Country and should remain a day of reflection and remembrance honoring those great souls we lost.”

His remarks faced rebuke from Sen. Lindsey Graham, who disagreed with his support for Biden’s withdrawal of forces “against sound military advice.”

“With all due respect to former President Trump, there is nothing ‘wonderful’ or ‘positive’ about allowing safe havens and sanctuary for terrorists to reemerge in Afghanistan or see Afghanistan be drawn back into another civil war,” Graham said, per CNN.

Speaking to MacCallum, Pompeo said that the severely deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan, which led to the United States announcing that it was going to re-deploy some 3,000 troops to Afghanistan to assist in the secure withdrawal of American civilians, was the result of “poor planning, poor leadership, and that the model of deterrence that the Trump Administration had in place as we prepared to bring the soldiers, sailors, marines, everybody who is on the ground there, home, looks like they have not been able to execute this.”

“Martha, you know this, big strategy depends on planning and execution,” he added. “Looks like there is a bit of panic. I hope that they’ve got the right number of folks, that they can get them there quickly. I hope that we can protect Americans in the way that the Trump Administration had every intention of doing as we drew down our forces there.”

“I don’t know exactly what they are doing, but we had conditions attached to how we were thinking about this withdrawal — I was part of those negotiations,” Pompeo said. “I was also in the room when President Trump made very clear to Mullah Baradar, the senior Taliban negotiator, that if you threatened an American, if you scared an American, certainly if you hurt an American, that we would bring all American power to bear to make sure that we went to your village, to your house. We were very clear about the things we were prepared to do to protect American lives. And indeed, since we began those negotiations back in February of 2020, there wasn’t a single American killed by the Taliban. We had established a deterrence model.”

“I hope we haven’t lost that for the Americans who are still on the ground there in Kabul,” said Pompeo. “And then the last thing, Martha, we had begun the reduction of our operations in that embassy. I ordered a drawdown in the embassy in Kabul that took place. We were continuing to reduce our risk and our footprint there. I hope that they continued down that path. I hope that we are now in a place that to get our folks out of there in a way that is rational and consistent not only with the need to get our Americans home but making sure this ungoverned space doesn’t become another hotbed for Al Qaeda, ISIS or some other radical Islamic terrorist group.”

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