Trump’s Taliban deal kept haunting the Kabul collapse
The Afghanistan withdrawal was still the dominant Trump-world story on September 1, 2021, because the whole catastrophe kept tracing back to the February 2020 Doha agreement that set the U.S. exit framework and gave the Taliban enormous leverage. The argument in Washington was no longer whether Trump handed Biden a bad hand; it was how much of the airport chaos, diplomatic damage, and credibility collapse started with Trump’s own bargain with the Taliban.