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CNN
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Foreign policy may not be the most important issue for most voters, but it is at the forefront of this week’s presidential campaign.
A new behind-the-scenes report from Donald Trump’s White House raises serious questions about his handling of the job of commander in chief. It is the latest in a long line of criticisms from former generals who served under Trump.
Trump, in turn, has stepped up his criticism of the Biden administration and the chaotic end to the decades-long U.S. war in Afghanistan, even though that plan was originally hatched during Trump’s time in office.
The new account of Trump’s time as commander in chief comes from Lt. Gen. HR McMaster, who served as Trump’s national security adviser. Unlike other generals who served under Trump, McMaster had previously refrained from directly criticizing his former boss after leaving the White House.
CNN’s Peter Bergen writes about McMaster’s new memoir, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.”
This report joins well-documented warnings from other generals describing their time in the Trump White House. They include retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, who served as Secretary of Defense under Trump, and Gen. Mark Milley, Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But Trump points to a failure of the Biden administration as he argues for another term in the White House.
Afghanistan concerns Biden and Harris
At Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, politics was not openly mentioned on Monday, when Trump commemorated the third anniversary of the deaths of 13 American soldiers in Afghanistan, but those deaths are frequently mentioned in the campaign.
Family members of some The fallen soldiers appeared on stage at the Republican National Convention in July and condemned Biden.
Paula Knauss Selph, the mother of Sergeant Ryan Christian Knauss, who was killed in the attack, spoke out sharply against Biden in an interview with CNN from Fort Liberty in North Carolina on Monday.
“This administration has tried to sweep this under the rug, and that is absolutely not going to work for this country,” she said, adding that Vice President Kamala Harris “has the same responsibility as President Biden.”
The soldiers died in 2021 along with more than 100 Afghans in a suicide attack outside the Abbey Gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, at the end of two decades of direct American military involvement in Afghanistan.
The Taliban now control Afghanistan.
The final withdrawal of U.S. troops was Biden’s decision, and it happened under his leadership. Republicans, including Trump, have turned the chaotic and deadly withdrawal into a domestic political issue against Biden and, by extension, Harris, who has taken Biden’s place to run against Trump in November.
During a stopover in Virginia, Trump said after his appearance at the cemetery that the people who died there were “killed at the most embarrassing moment in our country’s history, in Afghanistan, because we had an incompetent president with incompetent people at the helm, and every single one of those people should have been fired.”
At a later National Guard conference in Detroit, Trump reiterated his promise to purge the Pentagon of all senior military officials involved in the withdrawal.
In a statement commemorating the 13 American casualties, Harris said, “I mourn and honor them.” She also praised Biden for “the courageous and right decision to end America’s longest war.”
The truth is a little more complicated.
Trump had actually promised to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan during his presidency. His administration set the final withdrawal in motion by negotiating and signing an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that called for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
After Trump lost the presidential election, he fired his then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, dismissed numerous senior Pentagon officials, and attempted to further accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Europe.
Biden reversed the troop withdrawal from Europe, but only delayed Trump’s plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by a few months, despite the deteriorating situation there and the rapid advance of the Taliban.
Although Trump has criticized Harris and Biden for their withdrawal from Afghanistan, he has also promised to be the president who will end all wars.
At the National Guard conference, Trump said Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, wanted “endless wars.”
He also received the endorsement of Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who was stationed in Iraq as a member of the Army National Guard and ran for president as a Democrat in 2020. Gabbard, now an independent, chose Trump, she said, because he did not start any new wars while in office – a phrase reminiscent of a 2023 endorsement of the former president by Senator JD Vance in the Wall Street Journal, who argued that Trump’s foreign policy was his greatest achievement.
Vance is now Trump’s running mate, and his election signaled that Republicans as a whole are turning away from their intention to promote democracy in other countries.
There is no doubt that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a failure. An official State Department After Action Review report identified problems in both the Biden and Trump administrations that contributed to it.
Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee have launched their own investigation that will undoubtedly shed a harsher light on the Biden administration – although an investigator on that committee recently resigned from his post, claiming that Republicans on the committee were unwilling to blame the U.S. military, including Milley.
