Trump says he cancelled secret Camp David talks with Taliban

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump said that he cancelled secret meetings with major Taliban leaders and the president of Afghanistan, set for Sunday at Camp David, and discontinued peace negotiations after a US soldier was killed.
The sudden demise of the talks may doom direct US negotiations with the Taliban that held out the prospect of ending 18 years of combat in Afghanistan, making it America’s longest-running war. The planned meeting revealed by Trump had been a closely-held secret.
The president had grown frustrated with the peace negotiations. His national security adviser, John Bolton, thought an agreement in principle that had been reached was inadequate and reminded Trump of the potential pitfalls, according to two people familiar with the matter.
So Trump tried to hammer out an accord personally by inviting the Taliban and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani for talks with him.
While the Taliban delegation never made it to the US, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the most senior Taliban leaders, would have been among those at Camp David, according to a person briefed on the plans. That would have produced the extraordinary scene of a US president sitting down with a commander of the militant force American troops have fought for years.
But Trump said in a series of three Twitter messages that he called off the previously unreported talks at the presidential retreat because the Taliban representatives “probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway.”
The Taliban admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed 12 people — including an American soldier — in order to “build false leverage,” Trump said in a tweet. “What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?”
The US has been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001, soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The talks would have occurred days before the 18th anniversary of the attacks that killed almost 3,000 people and prompted the US invasion of Afghanistan.
A US soldier and Romanian service members were killed when a Taliban car bomb exploded near the US embassy in Kabul. It was the second major attack there, even as the protagonists were nearing a peace deal that’s been months in the making.
At the time, Ghani, the Afghan president, decried the attack in the “strongest terms,” saying that making peace with Taliban militants who are still killing “innocent people will be pointless,” according to an emailed statement.
US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad said in a tweet days ago that “we are at the threshold of an agreement that will reduce violence and open the door for Afghans to sit together to negotiate an honorable & sustainable peace and a unified, sovereign Afghanistan that does not threaten the United States, its allies, or any other country.”
But Bolton argued that Khalilzad was accepting terms from the Taliban that were too vague.
The US has insisted that no deal would be final until the Taliban reached an accord with Ghani, direct talks that the Taliban long refused to undertake. Trump’s tweet indicated that the Camp David meeting was to be an effort to bridge that divide by having him meet separately with Ghani and the Taliban.
The State Department referred inquiries about Trump’s Camp David meeting — including who was scheduled to attend — to the White House, where communications officials declined to comment. Calls to a Taliban spokesman were unanswered.