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Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, Fox News contributor and former acting national security adviser to President Trump, told Fox News that President Biden owns the Afghanistan withdrawal disaster and the vacuum of Afghan power left by Biden is “much worse” than the power vacuum in Iraq that spawned the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Fox News asked Kellogg if he would compare post-withdrawal Afghanistan to post-withdrawal Iraq, where a power vacuum allowed ISIS to emerge.
“No, it’s worse,” Kellogg said. “At least with Iraq, you had some semblance of a government that we supported.” He noted that the 82nd Airborne Division assisted the Iraqi government after most US troops withdrew.
“The situation in Afghanistan is much worse,” added the retired general. He noted that while Trump’s deal with the Taliban would have forced the Taliban to stop working with al-Qaeda and prevent any Afghanistan-based offensive operation against the United States, that deal is no longer in effect.
Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg said President Biden owns the Afghanistan withdrawal disaster and that the Afghan power vacuum Biden left behind is “much worse” than the power vacuum in Afghanistan. Iraq which spawned ISIS.
(Reuters)
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“Who said they wouldn’t work with al-Qaeda? Kellogg asked. “Right now, to me, Afghanistan is basically like the badlands here in the United States in the 1800s. It’s uncharted territory for us.”
“The likelihood of some sort of attack of some sort is high,” the general told Fox News. He predicted that the United States would have to return, either with a “physical presence or with a kinetic presence,” such as the strike that destroyed an ISIS-Khorasan planner after ISIS-K suicide bombers killed 13 US servicemen near Kabul airport last week. .
Still, Kellogg noted that any potential strike against the Taliban or ISIS-K would depend on “the will of the commander-in-chief.”
“Trump has been very aggressive, if necessary, to solve a problem with the kinetic force,” the general explained, mentioning the strike that killed Iranian force commander Quds Quassem Soleimani and the operation that led to the head of the Islamic State Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to commit suicide.
As for Biden, Kellogg rebuffed the current president’s attempt to blame Trump amid the crisis.
Biden spoke on Tuesday to commemorate the withdrawal of the last US troops from Afghanistan. During his speech, the president hinted that Trump’s deal with the Taliban forced his hand to pull out.
“The previous administration’s agreement was that if we met the May 1 deadline they had committed to leave, the Taliban would not attack any US forces,” the president said. “But if we stayed, all bets were off, so we ended up with a simple decision. Either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we don’t leave and hire dozens. thousands more troops to go back to war It was the choice The real choice between leaving or stepping up.
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Still, Kellogg claimed that Trump’s deal with the Taliban was “null and void” before Biden took office and that if Trump was still president, he would not have withdrawn his troops from Afghanistan before he took office. May 1, 2021, deadline for withdrawal from the agreement.
“We established a conditions-based agreement that would have been between us and the Taliban with certain criteria to be met,” the retired general said. “The end state was going to be a government of reconciliation, involving both the Taliban and the government led by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.”
“The most important part of the deal was March 10, the deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government,” Kellogg argued, pointing to two clauses in the deal. In these clauses, the Taliban agreed to “start intra-Afghan negotiations with the Afghan parties on March 10, 2020” and to negotiate “a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire”.
“As I told people in the business world, if you sign a contract and the contract is not accepted or the conditions are not met, then the contract is null and void,” said the general retired. “After we left power, the deal was there but the Taliban did not honor it, so Biden had no obligation to honor it.”
“We had no obligation to continue with the withdrawal of our forces. The date of May was null and void,” Kellogg insisted. “It wasn’t a deal at all.”
He blamed Biden for not contacting the Taliban or Ghani’s government to renegotiate the deal. “When he initially chose the date of September 11, then August 31, the withdrawal date, it was up to him,” said the retired general.
Kellogg said President Biden used his speech to “put Afghan history together so that he is the aggrieved party,” but insisted that in reality, “Joe Biden is the owner of this debacle at the ‘to come up”.
Taliban fighters sit in the back of a van at Kabul airport on August 31, 2021, after the United States withdrew all of its troops from the country to end a brutal 20-year war – one war which started and ended with the die-hard Islamists in power.
(VICE KOHSAR / AFP via Getty Images)
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The general agreed with Biden that the war in Afghanistan must end, but he blamed the way the president carried out the withdrawal.
“No one disputes the reason why we do it. That’s how they did it. There was a different way of doing it. We provided him with that and he put it in the shredder.” , Kellogg said.
He presented Trump’s back-up plan if the deal collapsed completely.
“The backup plan was that we would never withdraw the final number of troops,” Kellogg explained. The United States would still have 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, with several thousand support personnel, sustained air power, and Bagram Air Base.
Kellogg warned that Biden’s “one-sided” withdrawal put America in danger.
“When we wrote the deal with the Taliban, they signed it, agreeing that they would not attack the United States. We were going to keep their word,” he said.
Speaking of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Taliban politician Kellogg said, “The president told him in Trumpian terms that he would hold him accountable for any breach of the agreement, that any attack on America meant that he would become a target. and he understood it. “
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“When he signed this agreement, it was a month after we killed Soleimani. He reads the newspaper and he knew we were going to sue him,” Kellogg noted.
The same message may not be so clear under Biden, the retired general warned.
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