Just about everyone in Washington knows Miles’s law: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” Rufus E. Miles Jr. was a Truman administration bureaucrat who coined that phrase, and we find it often comes in handy when understanding abrupt shifts in policy positions.
Witness the case of former secretary of state Mike Pompeo. In early 2020, as the incumbent at the State Department, he touted the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban that set the stage for the departure of U.S. troops no later than May 2021, a deadline that President Biden briefly extended. He defended the deal — and his Taliban interlocutors — even as the agreement came under fire for not involving the Afghan government, for setting the stage for the release of 5,000 Taliban militants from Afghan prisons and for having weak language on ending the Taliban’s ties to al-Qaeda. Although over the following 14 months attacks against U.S. troops largely ended, the Taliban built up its capacity for the stunning offensive that quickly toppled the U.S.-backed government.
