WASHINGTON
(AP) — President Donald Trump’s weekend tweet canceling secret meetings
at Camp David with the Taliban and Afghan leaders just days before the
anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is the latest example of a commander
in chief willing to take a big risk in pursuit of a foreign policy
victory only to see it dashed.
What had
seemed like an imminent deal to end the war has unraveled, with Trump
and the Taliban blaming each other for the collapse of nearly a year of
U.S.-Taliban negotiations in Doha, Qatar.
The
insurgents are promising more bloodshed. The Afghan government remains
mostly on the sidelines of the U.S. effort to end America’s longest war.
And as Trump’s reelection campaign heats up, his quest to withdraw the
remaining 14,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan remains unfulfilled — so
far.
Trump
said he axed the Camp David meetings and called off negotiations
because of a recent Taliban bombing near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that
killed a U.S. service member, even though nine other Americans have died
since June 25 in Taliban-orchestrated violence. But the deal started
unraveling days earlier after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani postponed
his trip to Washington and the Taliban refused to travel to the U.S.
before a deal was actually signed, according to a former senior Afghan
official.
Trump’s secret plan for high-level
meetings at the presidential retreat in Maryland resembled other bold,
unorthodox foreign policy initiatives — with North Korea, China and Iran
— that the president has pursued that have yet to bear fruit.
“When
the Taliban tried to gain negotiating advantage by conducting terror
attacks inside of the country, President Trump made the right decision
to say that’s not going to work,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,
who appeared Sunday on five TV news shows.
Trump’s
three high-profile meetings with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — including
the president’s recent brief footsteps onto North Korean soil — prompted
deep unease from many quarters, including his conservative base in
Congress.
And while the meetings produced
the ready-for-television visuals that Trump is known to relish,
negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang have been stalled for
months with no tangible progress in getting the North to abandon its
nuclear weapons.
Trump’s offers to hold
talks with the Iranian leadership have similarly met with no result and
Iran has moved ahead with actions that violate the 2015 nuclear deal
that the president withdrew from last year.
With
China, Trump has vigorously pursued a trade war, imposing billions of
dollars in tariffs on Chinese imports that have yet to force a retreat
by Beijing. So far, the discussions have unsettled financial markets and
have resulted in retaliatory steps by both Beijing and Washington.
Pompeo defended Trump’s foreign policy, depicting it as tough diplomacy, rather than naivete or inexperience.
“He
walked away in Hanoi from the North Koreans where they wouldn’t do a
deal that made sense for America,” Pompeo said. “He’ll do that with the
Iranians. When the Chinese moved away from the trade agreement that they
had promised us they would make, he broke up those conversations, too.”
Democrats
said Trump’s decision to nix a deal with the Taliban was evidence that
he was moving too quickly to get one. Far from guaranteeing a
cease-fire, the deal only included Taliban commitments to reduce
violence in Kabul and neighboring Parwan province, where the U.S. has a
military base.
New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez,
the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said the talks
were ill-conceived from the start because they haven’t yet involved the
Afghan government.
The Taliban have refused
to negotiate with the government its sees as illegitimate and a puppet
of the West so the Trump administration tried another approach,
negotiating with the Taliban first to get a deal that would lead to
Taliban talks with Afghans inside and outside the government.
“It’s
another example of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, which is a
high-wire act that ultimately is focused on Trump as a persona but not
in the strategic, methodical effort of creating peace,” Menendez said.
Criticism of the Camp David plan was not limited to Democrats or “Never Trump” Republicans.
“Camp
David is where America’s leaders met to plan our response after al
Qaeda, supported by the Taliban, killed 3000 Americans on 9/11,” tweeted
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. “No member of the Taliban should set foot
there. Ever.”
A U.S. official familiar with
the Taliban negotiations said the “very closely held” idea of a Camp
David meeting was first discussed up to a week and a half ago when Trump
huddled with his national security team and other top advisers to talk
about Afghanistan. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to
discuss private deliberations.
Some
administration officials, including national security adviser John
Bolton, did not back the agreement with the Taliban as it was written,
the official said. They didn’t think the Taliban can be trusted. Bolton
advised the president to draw down the U.S. force to 8,600 — enough to
counter terror threats — and “let it be” until a better deal could be
hammered out, the official said. Pompeo said he didn’t know if Trump
will follow through on his pledge to reduce the number of U.S. troops
there from 14,000 to 8,600.
U.S. envoy
Zalmay Khalilzad had recently announced that he had reached an agreement
in principle with the Taliban. Under the deal, the U.S. would withdraw
about 5,000 U.S. troops within 135 days of signing. In exchange, the
insurgents agreed to reduce violence and prevent Afghanistan from being
used as a launch pad for global terror attacks, including from local
Islamic State affiliate and al-Qaida.
Pompeo
said the Taliban agreed to break with al-Qaida — something that past
administrations have failed to get the Taliban to do. The insurgent
group had hosted al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden as he masterminded the
9/11 attacks. After the attacks, the U.S. ousted the Taliban, which had
ruled Afghanistan with a harsh version of Islamic law from 1996 to 2000.
But
problems quickly emerged. Even as Khalilzad explained the deal to the
Afghan people during a nationally televised interview, the Taliban
detonated a car bomb targeting a compound in Kabul where many foreign
contactors lived. Then on Thursday, a second Taliban car bomb exploded
near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, killing 12 people including a U.S.
service member. Khalilzad abruptly returned to Doha, Qatar for at least
two days of negotiations with the Taliban, but has since been recalled
to Washington.
It’s unclear if the talks
will resume because the Taliban won’t trust future deals they negotiate
with the U.S. if they think Trump might abruptly change course,
according to the former senior Afghan official, who was not authorized
to discuss the issue and spoke only on condition of anonymity. The
official, who has had many discussions about the peace process with both
U.S. and Afghan officials, said Khalilzad’s team was not aware of
Trump’s plans to tweet the end of the talks Saturday evening.
Trump’s
suspension of the negotiations “will harm America more than anyone
else,” the Taliban said in a statement. “It will damage its reputation,
unmask its anti-peace policy to the world even more, increase its loss
of life and treasure and present its political interactions as erratic.”
The
former official said the deal fell apart for two main reasons. First,
the Taliban refused to sign an agreement that didn’t state the end date
for a complete withdrawal of American forces. That date was to be either
November 2020, the same month of the U.S. presidential election, or
January 2021, he said.
The U.S.-Taliban
agreement was to be followed by Taliban talks with Afghans inside and
outside the government to chart a political future for the country.
Ghani told Khalilzad that putting a withdrawal date in the agreement
would undermine the all-Afghan discourse before it began; the Taliban
would have leverage in those negotiations from the get-go because the
U.S. troops would be on a timeline to permanently withdraw.
Secondly,
the U.S. was unsuccessful in convincing Ghani to postpone the Afghan
presidential election set for Sept. 28, the official said. The U.S.
argued that if the elections were held and Ghani won, his opponents and
other anti-Ghani factions would protest the results, creating a
political crisis that would make the all-Afghan talks untenable. Other
disagreements included why the deal did not address the Taliban’s
linkages to Pakistan and prisoner-hostage exchanges, the official said.
___
Associated
Press writers Cara Anna and Rahim Faiez in Kabul; Robert Burns and
Jonathan Lemire in Washington; and Julie Walker with AP Radio
contributed to this report.
