President Trump’s frighteningly pathetic foreign policy record got even worse Saturday as it released details outlining an ignominious, terrorist-friendly retreat from Afghanistan. As if to confirm just how feckless the Trump team was, the Taliban already began flouting the “peace deal” within two days after its details were announced.
The best early assessment of the deal came from Steve Hayes at the Dispatch. It notes that the Taliban gives up next to nothing in the agreement, while the United States capitulates on almost all the important points. Hayes didn’t put it in these words, but U.S. forces effectively will leave with tails between their legs.
The Taliban gets sanctions relief. The Taliban secures the release of 5,000 jihadists now in the custody of the U.S. or the legitimate Afghan government. (The Taliban, meanwhile, will release only 1,000 of the prisoners it holds.) Despite assurances from the U.S. defense secretary two weeks prior, the deal calls for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces within 14 months.
“The language of the deal assumes that the current elected government of Afghanistan will be removed in order to make the new government more ‘representative,’ meaning more Taliban-inclusive,” Hayes wrote. Yet, he wrote, the Taliban promised “no public break from al Qaeda,” and there are no “verification mechanisms” to ensure the Taliban will live up to its vague commitment to not “use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”
Remember that the Taliban not only openly welcomed al Qaeda and its 9/11 jihadists 19 years ago, but the Taliban itself is a vicious, indeed evil organization. Its laws are hideously repressive, and its list of atrocities against innocents is almost unimaginably long. Yet by this agreement, the U.S. openly envisions the Taliban officially will participate in power in a “new post-settlement Afghan Islamic government as determined by [some] intra-Afghan dialogue and negotiations.”
Predictably, after such a weak surrender by the Trump administration, the Taliban already is reneging and resuming armed hostilities. Even Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose toadyism toward Trump in the last few years has known few bounds, openly worried on Monday that the deal might “allow radical Islam to come roaring back.”
This is par for the course of Trumpian diplomacy. Despite his embarrassing attempts to mollycoddle North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un (“We fell in love,” Trump infamously said), Kim was up to his old tricks on Monday, firing two new projectiles south toward the waters between South Korea and Japan. Trump’s foolishly precipitous retreat from Syria is resulting in the consolidation of Russian power and a humanitarian crisis. Trump’s noisy threats against Venezuela’s socialist government so far have accomplished nothing other than humiliation for the U.S. And our NATO allies were caught meeting making fun of Trump behind his back, hurting our poor leader’s feelings so much that he left the meeting in a huff.
In results if not in tone, Trump’s foreign policy looks remarkably like the inept fumblings of President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, with the exception that Carter at least secured the tremendously successful Camp David Accords that established peace between Israel and Egypt. Trump can point to no such major successes.
At least Carter’s malaise had a moral component to it. Trump’s stumblings and bumblings show open disdain for human rights while accomplishing next to nothing. Alas, he’s making America abased again.
