Lamenting the results of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, former President Donald Trump on Tuesday night declared his “conditions-based agreement” with a Taliban co-founder had been both forceful and “understood.”
“We had very strong conversation,” Trump told Fox News’ “Hannity” of a conversation with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar Akhund, a Taliban co-founder. “I told him up front, I said, ‘look, before we start, let me just tell you right now that if anything bad happens to Americans or anybody else — or if you ever come over to our land, we will hit you with a force that no country has ever been hit with before, a force so great that you won’t even believe it, and your village — and we know where it is, and I named it — will be the first one.'”
Trump noted the Taliban’s planned trip to Washington was canceled during his administration after an American was killed as a show of power in the country, but the Taliban co-founder had understood his warning.
“I asked him, ‘do you understand?’ And he said, ‘I do understand,'” Trump told host Sean Hannity. “And I wanted them to get a deal done with the Afghan government.”
Trump added fleeing former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani was a “crook” who had “gotten away with murder,” and did not have Trump’s confidence.
“I never had a lot of confidence in Ghani,” Trump added. “I said that openly and plainly. I thought he was a crook and got away with murder. He spent all of this time wining and dining our senators. The senators were in his pocket.
“That was one of the problems that we had, but I never liked him.”
Trump mentioned the corruption of the fleeing president having reportedly escaped with piles of cash, adding the Taliban was truly the leadership to negotiate with during his administration.
“He got away with murder in many different ways, but I had a very strong talk with the Taliban, which I consider to be much more important in a sense, because they were the problem,” Trump said. “And they had been there for a long time and are good fighters and they fight hard. And after I said that, we had a pretty good conversation.”
Trump lamented the fall of Afghanistan under Biden’s withdrawal without conditions.
“I don’t think in all of the years our country has ever been so humiliated,” Trump said, calling it the “greatest embarrassment in the history of our country.” “I don’t know if I would call it a military defeat or a psychological defeat; there has never been anything like what’s happened here.
“This has been the most humiliating period of time that I’ve ever seen.”
Trump added the Afghan military “was basically bribed to fight,” saying the soldiers did it for money and not for their country, before they permitted the Taliban to take over quickly.
Story cited here.
