Trump’s Fmr. National Security Adviser Tells CNN Trump Bears Responsibility for Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal

While former President Donald Trump stated that those responsible for the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan should be “fired,” his own national security advisor said that he had a hand in the policies that led to it.

Trump used the third anniversary of the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate to lash out at his political opponents , including Vice President Kamala Harris . The bombing that resulted in the deaths of 13 service members in 2021 was seen as a major embarrassment for President Joe Biden and his administration. But retired Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster , Trump’s former National Security Advisor, said that Trump himself was partly responsible for the tragedy.

McMaster appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 on Monday to promote his new book, At War with Ourselves , which does not paint a flattering portrait of the ex-president and touches on Trump’s Afghanistan policies. Anchor Anderson Cooper began the segment with a clip of Trump saying: “We’ll get the resignations of every single senior official who touched the Afghanistan calamity to be on my desk at noon on Inauguration Day.” He added: “You know, you have to fire people. You have to fire people when they do a bad job.”

When Cooper asked if Trump had a hand in what happened at Abbey Gate, McMaster quickly agreed :

Cooper: You write in the book, “Trump established the first sound, long-term, low-cost strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia, but then abandoned that strategy and replicated the Obama policy of negotiating withdrawal timeline with a terrorist organization, setting the stage for the Biden administration’s humiliating retreat from Kabul in August 2021.” You were out of the White House at the time that this was done. You write that you “watched with incredulity and revulsion as he directed an envoy to negotiate withdrawal with the Taliban.” You would not have advised him to do that.

McMaster: Absolutely, and I advised him to do quite the opposite of that. In the run up to what was his decision in August of 2017. And I tell that story in detail in the book about how really Trump made a tough decision and made, I think, what was the best available decision, and put into place in 2017 the first sustainable, reasoned approach to Afghanistan. The war, by that point, had not been a 16-year war. It had been a one-year war fought 16 times over. But, you know, Anderson, he couldn’t stick with the decision. He didn’t stick with the decision. And I think people were in his ear and manipulated him into, with these mantras of, you know, “end the endless wars” and “Afghanistan is a graveyard of empires” and so forth.

Cooper: So when he is critical of the Biden administration’s withdrawal, which, I guess the Biden administration could have not gone along with the deal that was made. Biden did push back, though. Trump had set a guarantee withdrawal date, May 1st. Biden pushed it back to August. Trump had cut troop levels down drastically, even though the Taliban was still attacking. The Taliban had allowed terrorist organizations again to have a home in their government, in their country. But Trump had his hand on — I mean, does Trump bear part of the responsibility for what happened?

McMaster: Oh, yes. I mean, so the the whole premise of talking to the Taliban before you leave Afghanistan, why the heck were we even doing that?

Cooper: He was going to invite them to Camp David .

McMaster: Right. Even the Obama administration, when they made the mistake of pulling all of our troops out of Iraq in 2010 — which really set conditions for the rise of ISIS and so forth by 2014 — the Obama situation didn’t negotiate with Al-Qaeda in Iraq on the way out. And so if we were going to leave, why not just leave? What happened in these series of negotiations and concessions to the Taliban, as we kind of threw the Afghans under the bus on the way out.

Watch the video above via CNN.