by Allan J. Favish, All News Pipeline:
On Sept. 7, 2024, CBS News reported on statements by a national security spokesman for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign about former President Donald Trump’s agreement with the Taliban regarding troop withdrawals and President Joe Biden and Harris’ subsequent withdrawal from Afghanistan:
The campaign argues that Trump’s deal created a ‘virtually impossible’ deadline and left “the Biden-Harris administration with zero plans for an orderly withdrawal — only a dangerous, costly mess.”
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“Trump shamelessly attacks the vice president because he hopes he can trick the country into forgetting that his own actions put troops in harm’s way,” Harris campaign national security spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein told CBS News. “Trump wanted to bring the Taliban to Camp David just days before September 11th—think about that. He cut a bad deal with the very same people who violently took over Afghanistan and led to the collapse of the Afghan government.”
Apparently unmentioned by the Harris campaign to CBS News, and unreported in CBS’s article is that the agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban was not a Treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate. Therefore, it had no legal force as to President Joe Biden, as reported by the Associated Press in August 2021:
But Biden can go only so far in claiming the agreement boxed him in. It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.
Chris Miller, acting defense secretary in the final months of the Trump administration, chafed at the idea that Biden was handcuffed by the agreement.
“If he thought the deal was bad, he could have renegotiated. He had plenty of opportunity to do that if he so desired,” Miller, a top Pentagon counterterrorism official at the time the Doha deal was signed, said in an interview.
The AP further reported:
U.S. officials made clear at the time that the agreement was conditions-based and the failure of intra-Afghan peace talks to reach a negotiated settlement would have nullified the requirement to withdraw.
One day before the Doha deal, a top aide to chief U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad said the agreement was not irreversible, and “there is no obligation for the United States to withdraw troops if the Afghan parties are unable to reach agreement or if the Taliban show bad faith” during negotiations.
Just as Trump was able to get out of President Barack Obama’s Iran Deal, Biden was not bound by Trump’s deal with the Taliban. Biden was free to do the right thing, but he did the wrong thing. He did it with Harris’ support, as she explained to CNN at the time at 5:35 in this interview.
The agreement Trump made with the Taliban was conditional on the Taliban acting in a particular manner. Part 1, subsection B of the agreement states: “With the commitment and action on the obligations of the” Taliban, the U.S. will withdraw. On page 3 of the agreement in Part 2, the obligations of the Taliban were set forth. The most important are item 1 in Part 2, which states that the Taliban “will not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qa’ida, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies,” and item 3 in Part 2, which states that the Taliban “will prevent any group or individual in Afghanistan from threatening the security of the United States and its allies . . . .” With its violence against the United States military and the Afghanistan government, the Taliban violated these provisions, thereby releasing the United States from performing its obligation of withdrawal. Two of Trump’s officials who helped negotiate this deal wrote about it here and here.
On Sept. 8, 2024, the Republican majority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee released a report that states on page 19:
Warnings were issued from Ambassador Wilson, Embassy Kabul’s regional security officer (RSO), Embassy diplomats, senior State Department officials in Washington, D.C., and senior U.S. military officials that the Taliban were actively violating the Doha Agreement. Yet, the decision to withdraw was made anyway. The Biden-Harris administration had clear and undisputable authority to pause the withdrawal pursuant to the Doha Agreement, but instead used it as pretext to justify their political aims. As State Department Spokesperson Ned Price admitted to the committee, the Taliban’s adherence to the Doha Agreement was “immaterial” to the administration’s decision to withdraw.
If the Taliban did not act as stated in the agreement, Trump did not have to follow the agreement. Likewise, assuming that Biden was bound by the agreement, which he was not, Biden did not have to follow the agreement if the Taliban did not perform its end of the bargain.
Even if Biden was legally bound to withdraw, which he was not, there was nothing in Trump’s agreement with the Taliban that required Biden to withdraw the United States military before withdrawing all United States civilian citizens and Afghans who helped the U.S. The National Desk reported in March of this year that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley testified “I’ll be candid — I don’t know the exact number of Americans that were left behind because the starting number was never clear.” The National Desk further reported: “Milley also revealed he lacked information on the number of Afghans who served with U.S. forces. Some of these individuals, he believed, were killed ‘in some pretty brutal ways.’”
Nor was there anything in the agreement that required Biden to leave behind over $7 billion in military equipment for the Taliban. Given Trump’s history as a businessman and as President, it is highly unlikely that he would leave $7 billion of anything behind for the Taliban to use or sell.
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