If you think Biden was bound by Doha, read the AP article

The Associated Press has a factual story of the Afghanistan-Taliban agreement that Biden said he couldn’t get out of, and it proves Joe Biden is not telling you the truth.

Joe Biden continually points to the agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, to push blame onto Donald Trump for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in a blitz. He says it bound him to withdraw U.S. troops, setting the stage for the chaos engulfing the country.

You can read it yourself on the link or you can read the italicized key passages from the story below with the irrelevancies removed. The point is Biden could have left the agreement at ANY TIME.

Biden is the President who overturned every policy Donald Trump put in place, but, somehow, not this one. What Joe Biden refuses to say is that the Trump-Taliban deal had an escape clause. He could have left it at any time or followed the plan to make it go far more smoothly.

Chris Miller, acting defense secretary in the final months of the Trump administration, chafed at the idea that Biden was handcuffed by the agreement.

It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.

“If he thought the deal was bad, he could have renegotiated. He had plenty of opportunity to do that if he so desired,” Miller, a top Pentagon counterterrorism official at the time the Doha deal was signed, said in an interview.

~~~

Trump spoke cautiously about the deal’s prospects for success, warning of military firepower if “bad things happen.” Pompeo similarly said the U.S. was “realistic” and “restrained,” determined to avoid endless wars.

~~~

U.S. officials made clear at the time that the agreement was conditions-based and the failure of intra-Afghan peace talks to reach a negotiated settlement would have nullified the requirement to withdraw.

One day before the Doha deal, a top aide to chief U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad said the agreement was not irreversible, and “there is no obligation for the United States to withdraw troops if the Afghan parties are unable to reach agreement or if the Taliban show bad faith” during negotiations.

~~~

Those negotiations were intended to begin within a month of the deal being signed but were delayed amid disputes between the Taliban and the Afghan government over prisoner releases. Amid fits and starts, the negotiations had not produced any outcome by the time Biden announced his withdrawal decision in April. Nor have they done so since.
Miller said it was the “right approach” and necessary to force Ghani into negotiations. He said the Doha deal was always supposed to be “phase one” of the process, with the next part being the U.S. using its leverage to have Ghani negotiate on a power-sharing deal with the Taliban.

“Obviously, he was not jazzed by that, but he was going to do it — or he was going to be removed,” Miller said. “We were going to put some serious pressure on him to make him cut a deal with the Taliban.”

You can argue that was unfair but what you can’t say is Biden was bound by it or even followed its planned negotiations. He took Phase One and ran with it.

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/61FmpLPEm0

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) August 28, 2021

PowerInbox