Trump breaks off talks on end to US war in Afghanistan

By Bill Van Auken

9 September 2019

In a bizarre series of tweets on Saturday night, US President Donald Trump said that he had called off secretly planned talks at the Camp David presidential retreat for the next day with both the US-backed regime in Afghanistan and the Taliban.

He also announced that Washington was halting its nearly year-long negotiations with the Taliban in Qatar aimed at ending the 18-year-old American military intervention in Afghanistan, the longest war in US history.

“Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday. They were coming to the United States tonight,” Trump declared on Twitter Saturday.

He claimed that he had called off the talks in response to a suicide car bombing at a checkpoint near the US Embassy in Kabul last Thursday that claimed the lives of 12 people, including one US soldier and a member of the Romanian military attached to the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast, as it had for an earlier suicide bomb attack last Monday that killed at least 18 people near the so-called Green Village, a fortified enclave in Kabul housing US military contractors and NGOs.

US troops in Spera, Afghanistan, on Nov. 16, 2009 [Credit: U.S. Air force]

After the latest bombing, Trump claimed, “I immediately cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations. What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?”

As with most of the US president’s tweets, every word is a lie.

There was no immediate cancelation of the planned meeting. On Friday, a day after the bombing in Kabul, the chief US negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the senior US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Scott Miller, flew to Doha, the Qatari capital, for another round of talks with the Taliban.

Taliban negotiators themselves said that until Saturday, there appeared to be no disruption of the Doha talks, which completed their ninth round at the end of August. On September 2, Khalilzad announced that a peace agreement had been concluded “in principle,” which still had to be approved by Trump.

As for “what kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position,” Trump doesn’t have to look far to find the answer.

The US military and Afghan puppet security forces have sharply stepped up bombing and assassination campaigns directed against the Taliban and its sympathizers. In recent weeks, a number of senior Taliban commanders and their relatives have been killed as Washington uses military force in a bid to promote its own “bargaining position.”

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported last month that at least 1,500 people were killed in July, the highest death toll since May 2017. This follows an earlier UN report that found that civilian deaths rose to 3,804 in 2018, an 11 percent increase over the previous year and the highest annual toll since the war began with the US invasion of October 2001.

Another report put out by UNAMA in May stated that US-NATO forces along with the Afghan security forces killed more civilians during the first three months of this year (when the Doha talks were already ongoing) than the number falling victim to the Taliban and other armed groups opposed to the regime in Kabul.

Appearing on television news talk shows on Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended Trump’s aborted plan to bring the Taliban to Camp David, while reporting that the US military had killed 1,000 of its fighters over the previous 10 days.

Clearly, both the Taliban and the US military have continued armed attacks—American attacks proving far more deadly—even as US and Taliban negotiators have been hammering out a deal in Doha.

The deal, trading a US troop withdrawal for a guarantee that Al Qaeda and related groups will not be allowed to use Afghanistan for preparing and launching overseas attacks, reportedly called for the withdrawal of some 5,400 US troops from Afghanistan. This was to begin roughly five months after the agreement was signed, with the Pentagon either closing or turning over to Afghan security forces five of its bases in the country.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/09/afgh-s09.html