Mike Pompeo Blasts Biden After Trying To Blame Trump Admin For Afghanistan Insurrection
Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed President Joe Biden for trying to point finger at the Trump administration for the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan believed to be caused by the public withdrawal of US troops in the Middle Eastern country.
Pompeo said the Democratic administration is resorting to blaming the former administration rather than owning its mistakes.
Fox News host Chris Wallace, asked Pompeo how dire the situation is in Afghanistan with an inevitable full takeover of the Taliban.
To this, Pompeo — who served under President Donald Trump initially as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 2017 to 2018 and eventually as the 70th US Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021 — said point blank that the Biden administration failed on executing its exit plan out of Afghanistan.
“It looks like the Biden administration has just failed in its execution of its own plan. This reminds me of when we have seen previous administrations allow embassies to be overrun. It’s starting to feel that way. It also looks like there’s a bit of panic having to reinsert soldiers to get them out,” Pompeo said.
“The plan should have been, much like we had, was that we would have an orderly conditions-based way to think about how to draw down our forces there,” he added.
“This did not happen under our watch”
Pompeo went on to explain the planned withdrawal plan under former President Donald Trump — as he reiterated that despite Biden blaming the former administration, “this did not happen on our watch.”
“Were I still the secretary of state with a commander in chief like President Trump, the Taliban would have understood that there were real costs to pay if there were plots against the United States of America from that place,” Pompeo said. “Qassem Soleimani learned that lesson, and the Taliban would have learned it as well.”
The former secretary of state also noted that Biden was only attempting to shift blame to Trump for his failures.
“I wouldn’t have let my 10-year old son get away from this kind of pathetic blame-shifting. He should be less focused on trying to blame this on someone else than on solving the problem of making sure that we protect and defend American security,” Pompeo said.
“It’s worth noting this did not happen on our watch,” he added.
Pompeo continued: “We reduced our forces significantly and the Taliban didn’t advance on capitals all across Afghanistan. So it’s just a plain old fact that this is happening under the Biden administration’s leadership now almost a quarter of our way into his first term, this is not the way leaders lead, by pointing backwards.”
Pompeo went on to list the “bad deals” also inherited by the Trump administration — which they were able to fix once Trump took over.
“We had a bad deal we inherited — the JCPOA [Iran nuclear deal]; we got out of it. We secured America from the risk from Iran. We inherited a horrible deal in Syria where ISIS controlled real estate the size of Great Britain. We crushed them,” Pompeo said.
“Every president confronts challenges. This president confronted a challenge in Afghanistan. He has utterly failed to protect the American people from this challenge.”
In an address to the nation over the Afghanistan fiasco, Biden said he stands “squarely behind” his decision to exit Afghanistan and criticized US-trained Afghan forces for not being willing to fight for their own country — although he also acknowledged that the Taliban took Kabul “more quickly than we anticipated.”
Biden then blamed the Trump administration which would have seen a pullout of troops by May 1, 2021.
“The choice I had to make, as your president, was either to follow through on that agreement, or go back to fighting the Taliban,” Biden said, adding that not following through with the agreement would risk “escalating the conflict and sending thousands more US forces lurching back into the third decade of conflict.”
Former President Trump earlier said in a statement, however, that Biden did not follow through their plan leading to the unfolding debacle in Afghanistan.
“Joe Biden gets it wrong every time on foreign policy, and many other issues …” Trump said. “He ran out of Afghanistan instead of following the plan our Administration left for him — a plan that protected our people and our property, and ensured the Taliban would never dream of taking our Embassy or providing a base for new attacks against America. The withdrawal would be guided by facts on the ground.”
Trump also slammed Biden’s “weakness, incompetence” which allowed the Taliban to take over Afghanistan with little to no resistance.
“After I took out ISIS, I established a credible deterrent,” Trump said. “That deterrent is now gone. The Taliban no longer has fear or respect for America, or America’s power.”
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