Former President Donald Trump says his deal with the Taliban in exchange for the withdrawal of U.S. service members cost no American lives — turning his successor’s Afghanistan narrative on its head.
In an interview with Breitbart News posted Thursday, Trump noted the deal he signed in February 2020 with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar was based on the condition there would be no American casualties.
“And the people that I was doing a very good job of dealing with — remember, we haven’t had a soldier killed in a year and a half,” Trump told the outlet. “That was part of — that was a condition. No soldiers were killed — no American soldier was killed.”
Trump said Biden owns the chaos created with the withdrawal he oversaw.
“When you have something that’s so obviously stupid, and everybody else goes along with it, he must be to a certain extent calling the shots,” Trump told Breitbart.
“Take a look at what happened. He came up with a plan that’s so crazy, and stupid. And the people can’t be that dumb that they would go to approve it. So he must have said this is what he wants to do, and they went along with it.”
“All he had to do is a similar thing — what I was doing was just taking the military out last, and when everybody is out, when all the equipment is out and everything is gone, and then we just take the military and we wave ‘bye bye,’” he said. “Call it a bad experience. And we would have got out with great dignity and we could have even claimed victory. This is a pure loss.”
Trump blasted Biden for withdrawing the military before U.S. citizens and Afghan allies.
“The only thing that surprised me is that everybody knew how absolutely stupid this situation in Afghanistan was, that it should have never ever been this way,” Trump told Breitbart.
“Because everybody knows. A child would know, you take the military out last. You get everybody out, then you get all the equipment — you take your $83 billion worth of equipment — then you blow up the bases. And perhaps you stay at, you take a certain area that you may want to keep like Bagram [Air Base] and keep the base Bagram because it’s next to China and Iran. It costs billions and billions of dollars to build. And maybe you keep that for other reasons. But everybody knows that you take your military out last. And they took the military out first.”
Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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