More Lies? Secretary of State Blinken Claims Trump Admin Did Not Leave an Afghanistan Withdrawal Plan

The disastrous exit from Afghanistan has permanently tarnished Joe Biden’s presidency, but don’t expect his administration to stop trying to deflect the facts instead they continue to place the blame on former President Donald J. Trump.

After weeks of anger from both sides of the political aisle, Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared Monday for a House hearing. Trying to escape responsibility, he claimed that the Trump administration did not leave them a plan for withdrawing from Afghanistan.

“We inherited a deadline; we did not inherit a plan,” he said during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, the first time the Biden administration has had to publicly face members of Congress on the botched Afghanistan withdrawal.

This appears to not be true based on what Former Trump Pentagon Chief of Staff Kash Patel has said on the record in an op-ed.

Patel wrote in the New York Post on August 19, 2021.

“We handed our entire plan to the incoming Biden administration during the lengthy transition. The new team simply wasn’t interested,”

I’m intimately familiar with former President Donald Trump’s Afghanistan strategy. In November 2020, I was named chief of staff at the Pentagon, where one of my primary responsibilities was to wind down the forever war in Afghanistan.

Trump instructed me to arrange a conditions-based, methodical exit plan that would preserve the national interest. The plan ended up being fairly simple: The Afghan government and the Taliban were both told they would face the full force of the US military if they caused any harm to Americans or American interests in Afghanistan.

Next, both parties would negotiate to create an interim-joint government, and both sides had to repudiate al Qaeda. Lastly, a small special-operations force would be stationed in the country to take direct action against any terrorist threats that arose. When all those conditions were met — along with other cascading conditions — then a withdrawal could, and did, begin.

We successfully executed this plan until Jan. 20, 2021. During this interval — when there were no US casualties in Afghanistan — President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban conducted multiple rounds of negotiations, and al Qaeda was sidelined. The result was a successful drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan to 2,500, the lowest count since the dawn of the War on Terror.

Reported by Breitbart

Patel also told Breitbart News that plans for removing Americans, equipment, and machinery, as well as for contingencies, was handed to the Biden administration, but “they just basically threw it out the window and fast forward six, seven, eight months.”

In addition, a former senior defense official told Breitbart News that then-Defense Secretary nominee Lloyd Austin even rejected a meeting with Trump’s outgoing Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller — a former Green Beret and counterterrorism official who had at the time just returned from Afghanistan in December.

So is this he said/he said situation or do these gentlemen’s track records and documentation confirm what took place?

The fact is no US military personal were killed over the 18 months prior to Biden being sworn in.

It was Joe’s decision that lead to 11 Marines, 1 Army Soldier, and 1 Navy Corpsman getting killed in a suicide bombing.

I blame Blinken, inept Generals, and Sleepy Joe Biden for it all.

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