PoliticoMike Pompeo takes his own arrows over the Afghanistan collapse
- Trump’s former secretary of state played a key role in the deal with the Taliban. He claims Biden botched it. Other Republicans are not letting him off the hook
- As secretary of state, Pompeo helped lead negotiations with the Taliban to lead to an end of the 20-year-old war
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Meredith McGraw on politico.com on August 26, 2021.
Few GOP officials have been more intimately involved with US-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, recognises 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 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.