During a town hall with NewsNation on Wednesday, 2024 Republican presidential candidate former Vice President Mike Pence stated that he disagreed with his 2024 rival former President Donald Trump on Afghanistan. Pence said that he wanted to follow the advice of military commanders to leave a couple thousand troops there and argued, “if we’d have had a modicum of troops there, I don’t believe the Taliban would have ever moved, and Afghanistan would be a very different place today.”
Pence said, “[A]ny time I had a difference of opinion with President Trump, I shared it with him in private, which is, I think, what a vice president owes to a president. And I shared some of those things in my book and I recount those. One of them is about Afghanistan. The President was intent on pulling all of our troops out of Afghanistan. Our military commanders, though, recommended that we leave a couple of thousand troops there, just like we had in Syria, just to maintain what they called a counterterrorism operation. So that, in the event that terrorist elements emerged, that we would be able to hit them before we have another day like we had 22 years ago this week. I made it clear that I thought that that was a prudent course and a part of me thinks that we would eventually have gotten there. But President Trump very much wanted all of the troops out. And when Joe Biden came in, I’m confident our military commanders told him the same thing, but, in his case, he pulled all the troops out and we all saw the disaster that followed, including the loss of thirteen brave American servicemembers.”
He added, “The truth is, if we’d have had a modicum of troops there, I don’t believe the Taliban would have ever moved, and Afghanistan would be a very different place today. And that was a difference that we had.”
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