The Republican Party has removed a page from its main party website that touted the deal that the Trump administration struck with the Taliban in 2020. That deal included a plan for the full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan on the condition that the Taliban did not provide support for terrorist groups like al Qaeda, but now, the Taliban has swiftly taken over Afghanistan to the point that the country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, has left. The Taliban launched this offensive as U.S. forces moved to complete their withdrawal that had been set in motion by the Trump administration.
Check out an image of the deleted GOP webpage below:
How quickly can the politics around Afghanistan change? Here's a section on the RNC's website in June; click it now and you get a 404 error. (Rest of page was about Kosovo/Israel-Arab deals.) https://t.co/kDJo95QfiF pic.twitter.com/HkZok9mgJW
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 15, 2021
Business Insider notes that, according to the internet archive service known as the Wayback Machine, the GOP webpage promoting Trump’s deal with the Taliban was taken down on Sunday, August 15 — right amid the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. The page had claimed that Trump “continued to take the lead in peace talks as he signed a historic peace agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which would end America’s longest war.”
Around the time of the Trump team’s deal with the Taliban, Trump publicly uplifted the group, insisting that he “really” believed that “the Taliban wants to do something to show we’re not all wasting time.” Talk about a dangerous miscalculation — and now, it seems as though the GOP would like observers to forget how gung-ho Trump was about removing U.S. forces from Afghanistan. The Trump administration’s original withdrawal deal didn’t even involve the Afghan government — rather, it just involved the Taliban, which operates in the country and has now essentially taken control of it. The group has already breached the nation’s capital city, Kabul.
As though he himself hadn’t helped set the withdrawal plans in motion, Trump has called for Biden to resign over the Afghanistan situation. President Biden, meanwhile, has insisted in contrast that “Trump’s Taliban deal left him with little option but to fully withdraw US troops,” as summarized by Business Insider. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed during a recent appearance on Fox that, if in power, the Trump administration would be conducting military action against the Taliban in connection to the group’s latest aggression against Afghan leaders — but such a course of action does not appear to have actually been outlined in the deal with the Taliban to which the Trump administration agreed.
