GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy pretends we have no way to know how Trump would have handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan, even though he's the one that negotiated the deal.
We already know that Trump and Pompeo negotiated with the Taliban and undermined the Afghan government that the United States has been propping up all these years, all but assuring the rapid collapse of the government we witnessed as soon as the withdrawal began.
Republicans have been trying to run away from that pesky fact, scrubbing the RNC web site of any mentions of the "historic peace deal" they once lauded, and as we discussed here, Trump bragged about locking Biden into a timeline for withdrawal and said the Biden administration "couldn’t stop the process—they wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”
Here's Cassidy on this Saturday's Cavuto Live on Fox, pretending that there's a possibility that this would have somehow gone better if their Dear Leader were still in charge, and then blaming the collapse of the Afghan army on airplane maintenance crews leaving the country, rather than Trump undermining the Afghan government by leaving them out of the negotiations they conducted:
CASSIDY: That's an imponderable. We will not know this. On the other hand, we do know there were some tactical decisions made in this withdraw by this administration that made it worse.
For example, among those who were first withdrawn, were those that were providing maintenance for the flight crews that gave the Afghani army air superiority over the Taliban.
Once the Afghani army lost that air superiority, their collapse began. And so how the withdrawal was handled was, again, almost program failure. How the Trump administration would have handled that we don't know. We can't know. That's a theoretical.
