Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned the Biden administration eight days ago in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News that it must exit Afghanistan in a way that prevents the Taliban from using it as a staging ground for new attacks on the United States of America.
The humiliating and sudden collapse of the Afghan government to the Taliban forces, and the rushed evacuation of the American Embassy in Kabul in the ensuing few days since that prophetic warning indicate the Biden administration was in no way prepared to complete that mission.
On Sunday, Lucas Tomlinson of Fox News reported “Afghan President Ghani has fled the country. ‘That’s it. It’s over,’ U.S. official says.”
Minutes later on Sunday, Tomlinson followed up with a tweet and this comment from former Secretary of State Pompeo:
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Saturday, August 7, just eight days before the pending fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, former Pompeo delivered a clear message to the Biden administration about it’s duty to the United States of America.
“How would the Trump administration have handled the exit from Afghanistan differently than the Biden administration?” Breitbart News asked Pompeo.
“We don’t know exactly what they’re going to do just yet,” Pompeo responded.
Eight days later, it appears the Biden administration also did not know.
“I had two missions that the president gave me as secretary of state. The first mission was to get our young people home, to get them out of harm’s way. The second was to make sure we left the capacity to reduce the risk we would ever be attacked from Tora Bora or Afghanistan again,” Pompeo explained in the interview.
Pompeo said that during his service as secretary of state in the Trump administration he met with the Taliban leadership and “had multiple discussions with them.”
“They were bad guys. They were very bad people who don’t care about human rights. They have an interpretation of Sharia that is violative of all the central things that we know and value and how you should treat other human beings,” Pompeo said.
“But in the end, you make peace and reconciliation with your adversaries, with your enemies. And so we were trying to find a path forward. I hope the Biden administration will do this,” he continued.
Pompeo then delivered a clear warning to the Biden administration.
“I hope they are still sincere in their effort to do the second part of the mission set, which is to ensure that we’re never attacked again from Afghanistan. When we left office, there were fewer than two hundred Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan, down from the thousands that were there almost exactly 20 years ago. That’s a really good thing, and we should be proud of the work we did to crush Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But today, they’re in Africa, they’re in Yemen, they’re in Southeast Asia,” the former secretary of state said.
“We need to make sure our resources are deployed appropriately to protect our homeland. And that’s the mission set. It’s the mission set President [Donald] Trump had given me. I’m confident we would have delivered on both of those missions. I pray the Biden administration can get both of those right,” he concluded.
