Ghani (left) and Trump (right)

The Dispatch: In February 2020, the Trump administration negotiated a deal with the Taliban, known as the Doha Agreement. At that time, the Taliban was not the government of Afghanistan—but Trump believed that the jihadist militia would defeat the government in Kabul, eventually, and wasn’t interested in doing what it would take to prevent that. Before it was undermined by Trump’s surrender to the Taliban, Afghanistan’s government under Ashraf Ghani—a Columbia-educated reformer who once served on the student council of Lake Oswego High School in Oregon and who was not exactly a beardy bomb-thrower from the mountains—was weak and struggling with corruption and all the usual problems of trying to govern ungovernable Afghanistan. But it also was trying to rein in the warlords, develop the economy, and clean up the civil service rather than trying to stage a worldwide jihad. Trump made a deal not with the government of Afghanistan but with the terrorists who were trying to overthrow it and who, in the absence of U.S. support, soon succeeded in doing so. Click here to read more (external link).