Dear Evan Davis,
You interviewed Sebastian Gorka on Monday 16 December to get an idea of the approach of Trump's new administration. You told us you didn't want to have a fight with him - as you ended up doing once or twice during the previous term - but you should still have done some fact checking and correction after the item.
One of his throwaway remarks referred to "the feckless lack of leadership in the Biden-Harris administration with the surrender of Afghanistan, and that becoming a hotbed for jihadi activity".
Biden and his generals (along with Johnson and his generals) didn't make a great job of that operation, but they were completing the plan embedded in Trump's agreement with the Taliban, not something of their own imagining.
Here is the Doha agreement negotiated by Mike Pompeo and the Taliban leadership in 2020
It stinks, not least in requiring the US and the Afghan administration to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners unconditionally before the Afghan government had any real involvement, and in failing to make the final withdrawal conditional on Afghan agreement.
And here, if you're willing to venture again onto Twitter/X, is how Trump set it all up, and how Biden didn't stand on the brakes.
Gorka's dismissive comment should have been given the context which shows it up as misinformation. I wish fact checking was normal practice at the BBC.
Yours,
Ed Wilson
