Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blasted the Biden administration for "poor planning, poor leadership" in executing the removal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Pompeo, speaking to Fox News Thursday night, said Afghanistan would not be falling to the insurgent Taliban if former President Donald Trump were still in office.
"It looks at best naïve and at worst ignorant," Pompeo said of Biden's Afghanistan policy, The U.S. Sun reported. "Weakness begets war, and you can see what weak leadership ultimately leads to."
President Joe Biden has said his hands were tied in terms of troop withdrawal due to the peace deal negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban.
However, as the Taliban sweeps across Afghanistan, even The New York Times said "there was still a way to pull out American troops while giving our Afghan partners a better chance to hold the gains we made with them over the last two decades."
Pompeo reminded viewers that Trump had vowed the Taliban would not regain control of the embattled country while he was president.
"We had a conditions-based plan for how we would get our young men and women back home," Pompeo said. "We were going to get our soldiers back, and we were going to make sure that this kind of thing you are seeing happened today could not happen, which is a breeding ground for what could potentially be terror attacks coming from this very place.
"I'll never forget the president saying, 'You got two missions, Mike. We have got to have an orderly plan and execution of leadership to actually do that, and then, second, you’ve got to make sure that we are never attacked from this place.'"
The Taliban was a threat to the international community, Pompeo said.
"We are now a little bit less than a month away from the 20th anniversary of when they came, when al-Qaida came and attacked our homeland," Pompeo said.
"We never want that to happen from Afghanistan again, so we had begun to prepare. We started to withdraw from our embassy in Kabul," he said. "President Trump himself made clear to the Taliban leadership: Touch an American and we are going to come hard and we are going to come fast."
Biden on Thursday ordered 3,000 U.S. troops to join 6,000 already in Afghanistan to help evacuate U.S. Embassy staff from Kabul.
In an earlier interview on Fox News, Pompeo said the added troops showed "poor planning, poor leadership" and seemed to indicate "a bit of panic."
"Big strategy depends on planning and execution," he said. "I hope that they’ve got the right number of folks and 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."
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