Donald Trump Holds Responsibility for Afghanistan Withdraw, Ex-Adviser Says

Retired Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser to ex-President Donald Trump, says Trump bears at least some of the blame for the botched U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

President Joe Biden has faced heavy criticism from Trump and other Republicans for the withdrawal. The last U.S. troops left Afghanistan at the end of August 2021, days after an ISIS-K suicide bombing at the Kabul airport killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghan civilians.

Trump attended a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday to mark the third anniversary of the attack, blaming Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for the attack on the same day. Biden and Harris marked the anniversary and praised the fallen soldiers in separate statements.

While the withdrawal was executed under Biden, it was the Trump administration that brokered a deal with the Taliban to leave the country in 2020. After the bulk of American forces left under Biden, the U.S.-backed Afghan government and military quickly fell at the hands of a Taliban attack.

McMaster, who was Trump’s top national security adviser from February 2017 to April 2018, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper during an interview on Monday night that his former boss was partly responsible for the debacle because he had decided to negotiate with the Taliban on terms of a withdrawal.

“Oh, yes,” McMaster said after being asked by Cooper if Trump bears “part of the responsibility for what happened.” McMaster then added, “The whole premise of talking to the Taliban before you leave Afghanistan…why the heck were we even doing that?”

“The Obama administration didn’t negotiate with al-Qaeda and Iraq on the way out,” he continued. “If we were gonna leave, why not just leave? What happened in these series of negotiations is we kind of threw the Afghans under the bus on the way out… then forced them to release 5,000 of some of the most heinous people on the earth.”

In response to a request for clarification from Cooper, McMaster confirmed that he was referring to the Trump administration forcing the then-U.S.-backed Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters as part of the withdrawal negotiations.

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said the following in an email to Newsweek on Monday night: “This is nothing more than fake news intended to use made-up, salacious fabrications in order to sell copies of a book that belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section.”

“The fact is that Comrade Kamala and Crooked Joe Biden are directly responsible for one of the biggest blunders in American history and they can’t gaslight their way out of the truth,” he added.

McMaster’s interview with Cooper took place as the retired lieutenant general was promoting his book At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, which is set to be released on Tuesday.

The Trump administration signed its peace agreement with the Taliban in February 2020 in Doha, Qatar, laying out a U.S. troop withdrawal timeline and commitments from the Taliban to prevent terrorism.

The Taliban have been in control of Afghanistan’s theocratic government since the withdrawal, regularly drawing international condemnation for alleged human rights abuses that often target women and girls.

In attempting to lay all of the blame for the withdrawal’s aftermath at the feet of Biden—and now often Harris, this year’s Democratic presidential nominee—Republicans rarely mention Trump’s role in negotiating the withdrawal plan.

While the withdrawal was taking place, the Republican National Committee scrubbed its website of content that previously praised the former president’s “historic peace agreement with the Taliban.”