President Donald Trump Monday said the U.S. talks with the Afghan Taliban as a peaceful way to conclude the longest American war are dead.
“As far as I’m concerned, they are dead,” Trump said following his weekend disclosure that he had called off a meeting where he was to host the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban leaders at Camp David to strike a peace deal that would have ended the 18-year-old conflict in Afghanistan.
While calling off the months long talks, Trump had cited the Afghan Taliban’s unrelenting attacks in Afghanistan including the latest attack that killed an American soldier and 12 Afghans.
The cancellation of talks has evoked a mixed response – relief among ordinary Afghans who saw the talks process serving the American interests and concern among strategic thinkers who say talks are ultimately the only way to end the war.
The U.S. and the Taliban representatives held tough negotiations over nine rounds in Doha, Qatar, and both had claimed before the sudden cancellation of the planned summit that they had agreed ‘in principle’ on a peace deal that would have allowed withdrawal of American soldiers.
In a Twitter post, President Trump said the U.S. is now hitting the enemy harder than at any time, signaling that Afghanistan would see more military actions against the Taliban in the days ahead.
We have been serving as policemen in Afghanistan, and that was not meant to be the job of our Great Soldiers, the finest on earth. Over the last four days, we have been hitting our Enemy harder than at any time in the last ten years!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2019
Pakistan had facilitated the talks at the request of the United States, using its contacts the nudge the Afghan militant group to the negotiating table. Trump thanked Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan for supporting the talks at a July 22 Oval Office meeting.
Trump addressed the question of 14,000 American soldiers deployed in Afghanistan in response to a question.
“We’d like to get out but we’ll get out at the right time,” he declared.
“They thought that they had to kill people to put themselves in a little better negotiating position,” he said of the Taliban.
Trump said the Afghan Taliban had made “a big mistake”.
He also explained his termination of the planned but undisclosed meeting at the Camp David presidential retreat.
“We had a meeting scheduled. It was my idea and it was my idea to terminate it. I didn’t even discuss it with anyone else,” the president,
“I cancelled Camp David on the basis that they did something that they sure as hell shouldn’t have done.”
Afghans are heading to presidential elections on September 28.
