Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday he hopes Sen. Lindsey Graham is wrong when it comes to the United States returning to Afghanistan.
The onetime Trump administration official told Lisa Boothe on her podcast, The Truth with Lisa Boothe, that U.S. forces pulling out after 20 years of war was the right thing to do, breaking from Graham, a more hawkish Trump ally, who warned the threat stemming from the Taliban-controlled country is too great to ignore.
“I pray that Lindsey’s wrong,” Pompeo said. “We had different views. He had more confidence in the Ghani government than I ever could muster. [Ghani was] not truly interested in working the political process inside of Afghanistan in a serious way. He was more comfortable working the power corridors of Washington, D.C., than he was the political operations in Kabul and surrounding provinces … the model that we used post-9/11 in Afghanistan, it’s not a model that I think makes any sense for us to contemplate going back to again.”
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Graham, a South Carolina Republican, likened the threat posed by a Taliban-led Afghan government to conflicts in other Middle Eastern nations, saying the U.S. will be forced to intervene after the Taliban, who have “a view of the world out of sync with modern times,” impose “a lifestyle on the Afghan people that I think is going to make us all sick to our stomach.”
“We will be going back into Afghanistan. We’ll have to because the threat will be so large,” Graham told the BBC on Monday. “[Afghanistan] will be a cauldron for radical Islamic behavior … You can say that’s no longer my problem … or hit them before they hit you.”
A survey conducted between Aug. 29 and Sept. 1 for the Washington Post and ABC News shows that a majority of U.S. citizens support the decision to end the war on terror but did not approve of the way President Joe Biden handled the withdrawal.
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Pompeo, who helped Trump devise a peace deal last year with the Taliban to leave Afghanistan, said former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country as the Taliban took Kabul, was one of the most corrupt people he worked with under the Trump administration.
“One of my most corrupt partners, people we were working alongside and providing money to was President Ghani in Afghanistan,” Pompeo said. “We need to be mindful that the political-military situation there improved only marginally over the course of two decades. We should be incredibly humble as we think about that.”
Pompeo said he still supports the withdrawal from Afghanistan even if he disagrees with Biden’s handling of it.
