Tuesday, May 10, 2022

‘I Want to Meet With the Taliban’: Tales of Trump’s Head-Scratching Diplomacy

 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/09/mark-esper-memoir-taliban-trump-afghanistan-00030810

I couldn’t believe this was happening. We were actually going to sit down with the Taliban at the president’s historic Maryland retreat, like old friends? There was no way Dunford and I could join him. The Taliban had killed and wounded more than 20,000 U.S. service members in Afghanistan since 2001, and that’s just counting the physical wounds of war. Not only couldn’t I personally do it, it would be terrible for any secretary of Defense or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be sipping tea with these terrorists, especially while we still had troops in a combat zone. It would be breaking faith with them, their families and our veterans. It was not lost on many of us, either, that the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was coming up in a week or so. This idea was terrible in so many ways.

1 comment :

  1. Right, distract from Biden's actual retreat from the Taliban in such disorder that well-trained American soldiers were killed by these savages and thousands of allies betrayed and left behind to die. But hey, Trump wanted to have them for dinner. Much worse.

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