(March 2) President Trump’s frighteningly pathetic foreign policy record got even worse Saturday as it released details outlining an ignominious, terrorist-friendly retreat from Afghanistan. As if to confirm just how feckless the Trump team was, the Taliban already began flouting the “peace deal” within two days after its details were announced.
The best early assessment of the deal came from Steve Hayes at the Dispatch. It notes that the Taliban gives up next to nothing in the agreement, while the United States capitulates on almost all the important points. Hayes didn’t put it in these words, but U.S. forces effectively will leave with tails between their legs.
The Taliban gets sanctions relief. The Taliban secures the release of 5,000 jihadists now in the custody of the U.S. or the legitimate Afghan government. (The Taliban, meanwhile, will release only 1,000 of the prisoners it holds.) Despite assurances from the U.S. defense secretary two weeks prior, the deal calls for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces within 14 months.
“The language of the deal assumes that the current elected government of Afghanistan will be removed in order to make the new government more ‘representative,’ meaning more Taliban-inclusive,” Hayes wrote. Yet, he wrote, the Taliban promised “no public break from al Qaeda,” and there are no “verification mechanisms” to ensure the Taliban will live up to its vague commitment to not “use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”
Remember that the Taliban not only openly welcomed al Qaeda and its 9/11 jihadists 19 years ago, but the Taliban itself is a vicious, indeed evil organization. Its laws are hideously repressive, and its list of atrocities against innocents is almost unimaginably long. Yet by this agreement, the U.S. openly envisions the Taliban officially will participate in power in a “new post-settlement Afghan Islamic government as determined by [some] intra-Afghan dialogue and negotiations.”
Predictably, after such a weak surrender by the Trump administration, the Taliban already is reneging and resuming armed hostilities….
[The full column is at this link.]
