Pence wants to exculpate Trump

Submitted by Malcolm (Israel), Aug 20, 2021 at 03:30

"Former Vice President Mike Pence suggests that President Biden 'simply didn't want to appear to be abiding by the terms of a deal negotiated by his predecessor.'" Mike Pence's statement makes no sense at all except as an attempt to exculpate Trump for being duped by the Taliban into making a deal that the Taliban never intended to keep. The withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan is the one major Trump policy that Biden decided to accept, if only because Trump himself had already reduced the American presence to a level that rendered the USA incapable of influencing further events there. When Biden set September as the date for completing the withdrawal, Trump on April 18 published a statement on his website boasting: "I made early withdrawal possible by already pulling much of our billions of dollars of equipment out and, more importantly, reducing our military presence to less than 2,000 troops from the 16,000 level that was there... Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do.I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible." As others have noticed, during the last few days that statement has been deleted from Trump's website along with earlier posts in which Trump boasted of having brought peace to Afghanistan. Indeed, several leading Republican senators were publicly critical of Trump's eagerness to leave Afghanistan. Now those same senators, out of electoral considerations, are pretending that the result was all Biden's fault, although Trump was the proud and eager architect of this disaster.

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