Damn, do I miss Mike Pompeo.

Pompeo, who served in the Trump administration as both the C.I.A. Director and Secretary of State always brought a quiet reassuring force any time he was representing this country either in a foreign capital or in media appearances. From the outside looking in, the former Secretary of State also seemed to have the best working relationship with Donald Trump of all the cabinet officials and was able to smooth out some of the Presidents IN YOUR FACE rough edges.

Trump and Pompeo left a situation in Afghanistan to the Biden team that had kept an uneasy peace, and with no Americans having been killed in combat in the year before Biden stumbled his way into the White House. We all know what has happened in the past two weeks to that plan that Team Joe had inherited and was abandoned with the chaos that has ensued.

After Joe Biden limped to the podium yesterday after 13 American military personal were killed at the Kabul airport and took the opportunity to blame the previous administration for this mess, Mike Pompeo was given the opportunity to respond this morning on America’s Newsroom. He made sure to set the record straight.

Bill Hemmer asked what the former S.O.S. thought of how Biden laid out the deal he inherited from the Trump team. Pompeo laid it out in clear terms…

Bill, as for the deal we were very clear from the beginning with the Taliban we were negotiating with the Afghan government also we had to deal with them too, we weren’t just talking to the Taliban. We were clear with the Taliban, we had this understanding that you’re going to live up to it and we had a conditions-based withdrawal plan and we executed that. We whittled down from 15,000 to a little over 2500 troops and the last 13 months of our administration and we didn’t have a single American attack or an American killed and it wasn’t because of a piece of paper that was a set of understandings but it was because the Taliban understood that if they acted against Americans and took actions that were inconsistent with what they promised when they pushed on us in the Trump administration we responded with American power and American might. We made clear to the Taliban that deterrence was going to be maintained and the difference is with the Biden administration is that when the Taliban pushed they withdrew and showed weakness.

Here is the simple breakdown.

*The force that Biden, Inc. inherited was just over 2,500 troops and was giving air support to the Afghan army to keep the Taliban at bay. This obviously worked for the last 13 months of the Trump administration, with the Afghan army holding most of the country and no U.S. serviceperson dying during that 13 months.

*The Taliban also knew that the Trump team had no problem dropping the M.O.A.B. (Mother Of All Bombs) as they had in 2017 against I.S. in Afghanistan and might be willing to do it again MOAB strike: US bombing of IS in Afghanistan ‘killed dozens if things got out of hand.

*Pompeo indicates that once the Taliban pushed the boundaries of the agreement and the Biden team rolled over it was game on. This is why it looks like Joe Biden and his team were caught off guard by how fast the Afghan army fell and the Taliban advanced. In reality, this was always going to be the outcome if the Taliban was not kept to clear lines that the Trump team had given them. The only person truly surprised by this was Joe Biden.

This has been a mess of historic proportions and it is shameful how fast this situation has deteriorated and it did not need to happen. Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo had made the best of a bad situation and the Biden team has just half-assed this and this is the result.

God help us all.