Harris, Trump clash on Afghanistan

Washington, Sep 11 (IANS) Vice President Kamala Harris defended President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw the US from Afghanistan saying it was something that four other presidents had wanted but not done and it saved $300 million a day that was spent on staying there.

But she pivoted to attack Trump for setting up the withdrawal with a deal with “terrorists” Taliban and keeping out the Afghan government. “He calls himself a deal maker, even his national security adviser said it was a weak, terrible deal, and here's how it went down. He bypassed the Afghan government. He negotiated directly with a terrorist organisation called the Taliban. The negotiation involved the Taliban getting 5000 terrorists. Taliban terrorists released and got this. No, get this. And the president at the time, invited the Taliban to Camp David, a place of storied significance for us as Americans, a place where we honour the importance of American diplomacy, where we invite and receive respected world leaders. And this former President, as President, invited them to Camp David because he does not again appreciate the role and responsibility of the President of the United States to be commander in chief with a level of respect,” she said.

“So if you take a look at that period of time, the Taliban was killing our soldiers, a lot of them with snipers,” Trump said, defending himself. “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 was, we were getting out. We would have been out faster than that, but we wouldn't have lost the soldiers. We wouldn't have left many Americans behind, and we wouldn't have left, we wouldn't have left $85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment behind. And just to finish, they blew it,” he further said.“The agreement said, you have to do this, this, this, this, and they didn't do it. They didn't do it. The agreement was terminated by us because they didn't do what they were supposed to do,” Trump added.