In 2020, then-President Donald Trump sowed the seeds for this week’s chaotic U.S. pullback from Afghanistan by striking a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops by May 1 of this year. But Trump’s final acting defense secretary has now audaciously claimed that the former president never had any intention of going through with his own plan. Chris Miller told Defense One that Trump’s deal with the Taliban was actually all a “play” to disguise his administration’s secret strategy. He said: “We weren’t just going to head for the door... We were going to jam [ousted Afghan president] Ghani hard and make him cut a deal with the Taliban. It would have been ugly. It wouldn’t have been great. But there was no plan to just leave.” The plan as recounted by Miller would have seen some U.S. troops stay in Afghanistan while the Taliban was invited to lead the government. An unnamed Trump official told Defense One that Miller’s plan would have been totally unworkable, saying the idea that a Taliban-led government would allow U.S. troops to stick around was “wishful thinking.”
