Fox News has been relentlessly pushing blame for the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan onto the Obama and Biden administrations, while skipping over key decisions that former President Donald Trump made in negotiating with the Taliban for the U.S. pullout. In one key example, they are highlighting former President Barack Obama’s release of Taliban figure Khairullah Khairkhwa from Guantanamo Bay in 2014 as part of a prisoner exchange for captured American soldier Bowe Bergdahl.
Fox is now billing Khairkhwa as the “reported mastermind” of the Taliban’s takeover of the country. But the network is also leaving out something else: the fact that in 2018, the Trump administration secured the release from a Pakistani prison of the man now widely expected to be the president of the Taliban’s new government, Abdul Ghani Baradar.
On Tuesday’s edition of The Story with Martha MacCallum, the anchor declared: “There was a lot of discussion back then in 2014, under President Obama, about whether or not this deal would put Americans in danger. Would these individuals return to the battlefield after they were set free from Guantanamo Bay? Well, here's the answer to that question.”
MacCallum never acknowledged Trump’s role in releasing Baradar, now the Taliban’s top leader. Moreover, a chyron in the segment claimed, “Gitmo Detainee in Bergdahl Swap Now Leads Taliban,” though Khairkhwa is not the group’s actual leader. (On a side note: Many conservatives had spent years calling for Obama to secure the release of Bergdahl from his captivity by the Taliban, and attacking him for having failed to do so — only to turn around and denounce Bergdahl as a deserter once the deal to free him was accomplished.)
But perhaps the most cartoonish example of this came from Fox’s purported “straight news” show Special Report with Bret Baier, in which the anchor said, “One of those negotiators is a familiar foe to the United States — and specifically, President Biden,” setting up a video segment from Fox national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin.
“The Biden administration is now left to deal with some of the same leaders the Obama-Biden administration released from Guantanamo Bay, including Khairullah Khairkhwa, one of the five Taliban commanders released from Gitmo in 2014 as part of the Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap,” Griffin said. “They quickly set up an embassy in Qatar, and eventually were among the leaders that the Trump administration began exit talks with, and now orchestrated the overthrow of the Afghan government.”
Griffin later noted that another prominent Taliban official had previously been released from Guantanamo Bay by the George W. Bush administration, and also that “the Trump administration forced the Afghan government of President Ghani to release 5,000 hardened Taliban prisoners.” But her report still did not mention the Trump administration’s specific involvement in Pakistan’s release of Baradar.