I can't get over the videos of these Taliban fighters as ridiculous country boys. Sure they're woman-hating murderers, but so were the kids the US sent to Vietnam to take orders from Lieutenant Calley. Who's a bad guy? Think about it.
What actually happened, on the American side, is now getting a good deal clearer, thanks to the brilliant folks at Just Security and retired CIA analyst Douglas London, who has given them a statement ("Afghanistan, not an intelligence failure but something much worse") based on his own work as counterterrorism chief for South and Southwest Asia in 2018-19 and as a Biden volunteer in 2020:By early 2018, it was clear President Trump wanted out of Afghanistan regardless of the alarming outcomes the intelligence community cautioned. But he likewise did not want to preside over the nightmarish scenes we’ve witnessed. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was the principal architect of America’s engagement with the Taliban that culminated with the catastrophic February 2020 withdrawal agreement, terms intended to get the president through the coming elections. Pompeo championed the plan despite the intelligence community’s caution that its two key objectives– securing the Taliban’s commitment to break with al-Qa’ida and pursue a peaceful resolution to the conflict — were highly unlikely.
America’s special representative, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, was a private citizen dabbling on his own in 2018 with a variety of dubious Afghan interlocutors against whom the intelligence community warned, trying opportunistically to get “back inside.” Undaunted, his end-around to Pompeo and the White House pledging to secure the deal Trump needed which the president’s own intelligence, military and diplomatic professionals claimed was not possible absent a position of greater strength, was enthusiastically received. Our impression was that Khalilzad was angling to be Trump’s Secretary of State in a new administration, were he to win, and would essentially do or say what he was told to secure his future by pleasing the mercurial president, including his steady compromise of whatever leverage the United States had to incentivize Taliban compromises. (h/t djchefron)
As in other cases, it was the announcement Trump wanted, not the thing itself, and he wanted it in the early part of the presidential campaign—for the presidential campaign.
