Mike Pompeo takes his own arrows over the Afghanistan collapse

Source: Politico | August 26, 2021 | Meridith McGraw

Trump’s former secretary of State played a key role in the deal with the Taliban. He says Biden botched it. Other Republicans aren’t letting him off the hook.

While the chaotic drawdown of the war in Afghanistan has taken a toll on President Joe Biden’s standing back home, it’s also complicated political matters for one prominent Republican with eyes seemingly on the White House.

Few GOP officials have been more intimately involved with U.S.-Afghan relations than Mike Pompeo, who as Secretary of State helped lead negotiations with the Taliban to lead to an end of the 20-year-old war.

With that ending now mired in chaos, Pompeo has rushed to the airwaves to defend his work and differentiate it from the job that the Biden team is doing. Republican strategists say it’s no coincidence. Pompeo, they posit, recognizes that his own electoral fate could be directly impacted by how the public perceives the current situation in Kabul.

“Trying to extricate yourself from this withdrawal is I think difficult if not impossible to do, especially to rewrite history about what actually happened,” said former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, a prominent critic of his former boss’ Afghanistan policy. “I think that’s a prescription for Democratic attack ads that would be fatal to someone’s credibility.”

Pompeo has been coy about his own ambitions for 2024, but the former congressman from Kansas, CIA Director, and Secretary of State has been popping up at high profile fundraisers for midterm candidates and rubbing elbows with influential conservatives in critical early-voting states like Iowa. His appeal to voters is due, in part, to the feet he has had in its two most prominent, recent movements: the Tea Party and Trumpism.

But that experience now carries some potential baggage. Pompeo met with the Taliban in February 2020 at the signing of a withdrawal agreement with the U.S. in Doha. A picture of him from that moment, standing alongside Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar, has circulated widely online in the last week. It’s the type of image that could dot and complicate future election bids, should he choose to make one.

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