And here it is folks: Admission by the Con's own lackeys that deal w Taliban was a bad one

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/19/trump-officials-scramble-distance-his-taliban-deal/?fbclid=IwAR3tLAaTXtHNfuB8k863Bsd8k_Gvcb7RbLb2s0GjS_mIergHkp74IPgace8

But as Republicans continue to prosecute that case, something interesting keeps cropping up: former Trump administration officials seeking not just to bash Biden, but to distance themselves from the Trump administration’s own actions on this front.

That goes particularly for the deal the Trump administration cut with the Taliban last year. And we’re talking about many of its top foreign-policy figures.

(Christopher) Miller’s implication seems to be: We weren’t really going to do this thing that just plunged Afghanistan into chaos and allowed the Taliban to re-seize power. But it still meant the deal was in place and had to be dealt with by Biden, who has argued that it left him with a choice between full withdrawal and an escalation if he pulled out of the deal.

Miller has argued that Biden could have renegotiated the deal if he wanted to. But as the Associated Press rightly notes, Biden had little leverage as someone who had been pushing for a U.S. withdrawal for years.

And that’s something several key Trump foreign-policy hands seem to acknowledge.

Esper, too, has tried to play his part in crafting the public narrative of Trump’s deal with the Taliban — but not in a positive way for Trump. Esper said Trump undermined the agreement by continuing to withdraw troops despite the Taliban not living up to its end of the bargain, which was signed in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020. And he explicitly tied that the deal to what happened in recent days.

“Otherwise,” Esper said to CNN of his advice to Trump, “we would see a number of things play out, which are unfolding right now in many ways.”

Trump’s former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, has been arguably the most brutal about the Taliban deal. Having in the past compared it to the infamous Munich agreement of 1938 which paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s rise, McMaster even more explicitly tied the events of the past week to it.

“Our secretary of state [Mike Pompeo] signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” McMaster told Bari Weiss. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”
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No sh!t