Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday declared that President Joe Biden has “utterly failed to protect the American people” on the U.S. troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, praising the Trump administration for its own “orderly plan.”
In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Pompeo blasted the scope and timing of the withdrawal that triggered a Taliban sweep of the troubled country, and ticked off Trump administration victories in the Mideast.
“We secure America from the risk of Iran,” he said. “We inherited a horrible deal in Syria where ISIS controlled real estate the size of Great Britain. We crush them. Every president confronts challenges. This president confronts a challenge in Afghanistan, he has utterly failed to protect the American people in this challenge.”
According to Pompeo, the U.S. military leadership has a lot to consider in the wake of the withdrawal’s failure.
“ I think the senior military leadership that had 20 years to build out these coalition forces, the Afghan national security forces, has to fundamentally rethink the training that they've provided them, the weapons they provided them, how they were thinking strategically about how they would hand us off to the Afghan people,” he said.
“We had a president [in] Afghanistan who wasn't prepared to do the right thing for his own national security, for his own country. I think that political failure and that military failure is something we're going to have to take a long, hard look at to make sure that we are always securing American freedom.”
Pompeo asserted the Biden administration “failed in its execution of its own plan.”
“The plan should have been, much like we had, that we would have an orderly condition space wait to think about how to draw down our forces there,” he said.
“I hope we get these folks out. I hope they will bring the airpower. They should go crush these Taliban who are surrounding Kabul.
“We should do it with American airpower,” he continued. “We should put pressure on them, we should inflict cost and pain on them. We shouldn't be begging them to spare the lives of Americans. We should be imposing costs on the Taliban until they allow us to execute our plan in Afghanistan.”
There’s a lurking challenge in the wake of the disaster, Pompeo said.
“What will the Taliban believe that the Americans are prepared to do if they begin to play footsie with al Qaeda or let ISIS begin to grow in Afghanistan,” Pompeo asked. “If it's like the Carter administration and the Obama administration and now what appears to be the first seven months of the Biden demonstration, the Taliban will feel free to do this.”
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Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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