Thanks to the Biden administration, Taliban terrorists have taken control of Afghanistan.
President Joe Biden’s reckless and rushed withdrawal from the country came with numerous consequences.
American citizens have been left trapped in Afghanistan, terrorist groups such as ISIS are regaining a foothold in the region and, as of Thursday, at least ten U.S. service members have been killed in suicide bombings.
Without a doubt, the Biden-led Afghanistan withdrawal is one of the worst foreign policy disasters of all time.
As the situation continues to devolve, it’s worth remembering that it didn’t have to be this way.
Biden was given a much better plan — a methodical, carefully constructed proposal for withdrawal.
Sadly, he scrapped this plan because of the man who made it: former President Donald Trump.
Kash Patel, Trump’s chief of staff at the Pentagon, detailed the former president’s plan in an Op-Ed for the New York Post last week.
As the man responsible for bringing “the forever war in Afghanistan” to an end, Patel was “intimately familiar” with Trump’s plan.
In his words, it was “a conditions-based, methodical exit plan that would preserve the national interest.”
Whereas Biden’s military appears to be scrambling to respond to terror attacks, Trump’s forces would have been prepared for that eventuality.
And while the Biden administration essentially rolled over as the Taliban took control of the country, the Trump administration would have threatened the terrorist group with “the full force of the US military if they caused any harm to Americans or American interests in Afghanistan.”
According to Patel, the plan involved first brokering a deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government to create an interim joint government, with both sides being required to repudiate al-Qaida.
Obviously, the Taliban couldn’t have been fully trusted not to renege on this deal, so “a small special-operations force would be stationed in the country to take direct action against any terrorist threats that arose.”
“We successfully executed this plan until Jan. 20, 2021. During this interval — when there were no US casualties in Afghanistan — President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban conducted multiple rounds of negotiations, and al Qaeda was sidelined. The result was a successful drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan to 2,500, the lowest count since the dawn of the War on Terror,” Patel wrote.
“We handed our entire plan to the incoming Biden administration during the lengthy transition. The new team simply wasn’t interested.”
So, despite all the progress Trump had made, Biden abandoned a plan that was working, opting instead for an “unconditional pullout with an arbitrary date based on pure symbolism.”
Despite shifting circumstances, Biden refused to change the withdrawal date, which eventually led to U.S. forces relying on Taliban fighters to protect Americans at the Kabul airport.
Thousands of American citizens were left behind following the withdrawal, stranded in Afghanistan because of Biden’s oversight.
“Tragically, because of the Biden administration’s single-minded focus on the pullout date, hard-nosed intelligence was replaced with wishful thinking and false promises. In April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken vowed, ‘We will withdraw our troops responsibly, deliberately, safely. … We’ll pursue a durable and just political settlement between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban,'” Patel wrote.
“None of that happened. Last month Blinken assured us that Biden’s withdrawal plan wouldn’t endanger the US embassy in Kabul, which is now evacuated. And Biden himself declared last month that it was ‘highly unlikely’ the Taliban would overrun Afghanistan, which they have now done with blinding speed.”
Another hallmark of Trump’s strategy was a plan to retain control of Bagram Air Base until all Americans had been evacuated from the area, Patel told Just The News.
Instead, Biden abruptly abandoned the base, leading to its fall into Taliban hands and leaving the Kabul airport as the only viable way out of the country.
Many U.S. weapons fell into Taliban hands as well, something Patel suggests would not have happened under Trump’s proposal.
“There’s no plan to secure our weaponry or machinery, we’re just giving it over to terrorists,” he told Just The News.
And the Taliban was far from the only terror threat Biden failed to address.
As the U.S.-backed Afghan government fell, many voiced concerns that the country would become a breeding ground for terrorists, including Islamic State group militants.
As the Taliban seized Afghanistan, hundreds of ISIS and al-Qaida prisoners were released from prison.
Less than a week later, ISIS terrorists were murdering U.S. Marines.
Trump’s plan never would have allowed those prisoners to be released in the first place.
“We were working with allies and partners to prosecute them either in America or prosecute them in their home countries of origin as we successfully did under President Trump,” Patel told Just The News.
“We had a plan in place and we were doing it. Releasing terrorists is never an option. It was never an option under President Trump.”
All of the horror and carnage taking place in Afghanistan right now could have been avoided.
If only Biden had listened to Donald J. Trump.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
