DAVID MUIR: Vice President Harris, thank you. President Trump, your response to her saying that you began the negotiations with the Taliban.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, thank you. So if you take a look at that period of time, the Taliban was killing our soldiers, a lot of them, with snipers. And I got involved with the Taliban because the Taliban was doing the killing. That's the fighting force within Afghanistan. They don't bother doing that because you know, they deal with the wrong people all the time. But I got involved. And Abdul is the head of the Taliban. He is still the head of the Taliban. And I told Abdul don't do it anymore, you do it anymore you're going to have problems. And he said why do you send me a picture of my house? I said you're going to have to figure that out, Abdul. And for 18 months we had nobody killed. We did have an agreement negotiated by Mike Pompeo. It was a very good agreement. The reason it was good, it was -- we were getting out.
Emphasis added. Trump negotiated the surrender of Afghanistan with the Taliban, releaseing 5,000 Taliban prisoners and drawing down troops to an unsustainable level before leaving office. To protect the remaining troops (and the Afghani government) would have required Biden deploying all new troops and commiting to extending the occupation. Biden chose not to do that, and finished Trump's surrender.
You know thinking about his answer, he didn't care about Afghanistan not falling. All he "cared" about was Americans not dieing, which didn't work anyway because he telegraphed everything. He served up Afghanistan on a platter.
So if you take a look at that period of time, the Taliban was killing our soldiers, a lot of them, with snipers. And I got involved with the Taliban because the Taliban was doing the killing.
Hmm, so context made it significantly worse this time.
The transcript has it amongst rambling about how much their leader respects him but the quote was, "I got involved with the Taliban because the Taliban was doing the killing."
The only successful deal he made was with terrorists that killed 3,000 American civilians in 9/11 and it was the worst deal to pull out of Afghanistan. He failed a deal with North Korea. And even with careful planning the complexity of the Afghanistan withdrawal would of been just as bad because the Afghan Goverment just handed territory over with no resistance
I didn't like this line of attack, yes you're going to have to negotiate with a terrorist organization after you lost a war to that terrorist organization and that organization is going to take control of the country. The fact that you talked with the Taliban isn't the problem, the fact that you negotiated a bad deal is.