Amid much relief, there also was uncertainty and uneasiness about the fate of efforts to reach a comprehensive settlement of America’s longest war
Mr. Trump’s decision, announced in a series of tweets Saturday evening, allayed, at least for the moment, mounting fears of Afghan officials, politicians and many in the public that an imminent deal between Washington and the Taliban to withdraw U.S. and other foreign forces from Afghanistan was catapulting the country toward catastrophe. The insurgents have refused to hold direct talks with the Kabul administration, which they view as illegitimate.
Sediq Seddiqi, spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, said Mr. Trump’s announcement demonstrated his understanding that the draft accord, negotiated over nine rounds of talks in the Gulf state of Qatar, “would not lead to a cease-fire and direct talks between the Taliban and Afghan government.” Mr. Trump’s announcement cited a Thursday suicide bombing the Taliban claimed responsibility for that killed at least 11 people, including a U.S. soldier and a Romanian soldier.
The U.S. president’s decision, Mr. Seddiqi said, “reflects the concerns raised by the Afghan people and government about a process that would make a group that is behind the killings of so many innocent people, both Afghans and otherwise, look victorious, rather than lead them to halt violence.”
The presidential spokesman’s praise was echoed by Sefatullah Haidari, one of many Kabul residents who had grown deeply suspicious that the chief U.S. negotiator to the talks in Qatar’s capital Doha, Zalmay Khalilzad, was bargaining away the rights Afghans had won since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 that forced the Taliban from power. The insurgents, he said, can’t be trusted.
“On the one hand, the Taliban talk about peace but on the other, they kill innocent people with suicide bombings,” said Mr. Haidari, a 28-year-old shopkeeper. “They should be answered with their own language, the language of war.”
Amid much relief and some swagger, however, there also was uncertainty and uneasiness about the fate of efforts to reach a comprehensive settlement of America’s longest war. Whether and how the U.S.-Taliban talks would resume wasn’t known Sunday.
A Western official in Kabul who has monitored the talks in Doha closely said that a quick resumption of negotiations was necessary to avoid an escalation of bloodshed, starting with elections scheduled for Sept. 28, in which Mr. Ghani is running for second, five-year term in office.
“Unless this is reversed very quickly there is a real danger the Taliban negotiators will feel they have been deceived and the hard-line faction in Quetta will have their wish of a continued war,” the official said, referring to the western Pakistani city where insurgency’s leadership council is based.
“Thousands more will die,” the official added.
Sediq Seddiqi, spokesman for Afghanistan’s president, praised President Trump’s decision to cancel a secret meeting with Afghan and Taliban leaders and suspend U.S. negotiations with the insurgents. PHOTO: RAHMAT GUL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A longtime Afghan observer of efforts to negotiate an end to the war said Mr. Trump was taking a big gamble in suspending the negotiations.
“He seems to view the peace process like carpet shopping—walking out of the shop and hoping the shopkeeper runs after you with a better offer. Sometimes it works, but often you don’t get the carpet,” he said.
The Taliban’s spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said that last month Mr. Khalilzad had delivered to Taliban officials in Doha an invitation from Mr. Trump to visit Washington. In his statement, he accused Mr. Trump of inexperience and acting impulsively on the basis of a single attack in Kabul this week, while ignoring the hundreds of deaths inflicted by U.S. airstrikes and Afghan ground forces.
It was only a week ago that Mr. Khalilzad declared that the two sides were on the “threshold of an agreement” following nine rounds of talks in Doha. He said a completed deal awaited only Mr. Trump’s signoff.
But during four days of follow-up briefings in Kabul by Mr. Khalilzad, Afghan officials lambasted the draft deal, with Mr. Ghani branding it “meaningless” and his senior aides insisting the agreement’s guarantees of Taliban compliance weren’t strong enough. With Army Gen. Scott Miller, commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, Mr. Khalilzad flew to Doha on Friday for more talks with Taliban about what both sides had said was an all but completed deal.
Meanwhile, long-simmering skepticism about the deal in Washington boiled over. In a joint letter last Tuesday, six former U.S. ambassadors to Afghanistan condemned the U.S. approach to negotiating a troop withdrawal, warning it risked a return to “total civil war.”
Two days later, Rep. Eliot Engel (D., N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee demanded in a letter to Mr. Khalilzad that he testify before the committee and give the American people “a long-overdue opportunity to understand the contours of your negotiations with the Taliban and the potential risks and opportunities that may result.”
Despite the swelling backlash, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday called media reports that the U.S. wouldn’t sign an agreement with the Taliban “ungrounded” and “ridiculous.”
Since Mr. Trump entered office in January 2017, U.S. officials in the Afghan capital have feared what they dubbed the “tweet of Damocles”—an announcement by Mr. Trump, in keeping with his stated aversion to foreign wars, that he has ordered the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel from Afghanistan.
But as the Doha talks progressed, Mr. Trump’s determination to achieve a substantial troop withdrawal from Afghanistan before next year’s U.S. presidential elections appeared to soften. He told reporters at the Group of Seven in France last month that the U.S. had “no timeline” for the talks and was in “no rush.”
On Saturday evening, a tweet of an unexpectedly different kind dropped.
Mr. Trump said the death of an American soldier in a suicide bombing carried out by the Taliban in Kabul two days earlier had led him to the decision to cancel the Camp David meeting and suspend the U.S.-Taliban talks. He called the attack an effort by the militants to create “false leverage” in its negotiations with the U.S.
Thursday’s suicide bombing in the Afghan capital, however, was only the latest in a series of Taliban attacks as the negotiations entered their late stages. Also, since the U.S. and the Taliban resumed direct talks in Doha more than a year ago, both sides have escalated military operations to gain leverage at the negotiating table.
Stepped-up American airstrikes have killed relatives of senior Taliban leaders and shadow governors in a number of provinces across the country, Afghan security officials say. In July, the United Nations said U.S. and Afghan security forces had been responsible for more civilian deaths this year than the Taliban.
Mr. Trump didn’t spell out the agenda of Sunday’s planned meeting, saying only that he planned to meet separately at the Catoctin Mountain retreat with Mr. Ghani and “major Taliban figures.” Hewing to their longstanding position, the insurgents have refused to hold direct talks with any Kabul administration, which they view as illegitimate.
A return to the negotiating table sometime in the future appears inevitable, since militarily, the situation on the ground remains a stalemate at best.
At the peak of the American military presence in Afghanistan, between 2010 and 2012, some 100,000 troops were deployed here. Even so, they failed to reverse the Taliban resurgence.
U.S. has 14,500 military personnel in the country, about half to train and advise the Afghan security forces, the rest to carry out counterterrorism operations and support air operations, and The Taliban today control more territory in the country than at any time since a U.S.-led invasion in 2001 that forced them from power.
Under the U.S.-Taliban draft accord reached in Doha, the U.S. would pull 5,000 U.S. forces from Afghanistan within 135 days of the signing of the agreement. Most of the remaining 9,500 American forces, along with 8,600 additional foreign forces, mostly from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, would be withdrawn in phases.
In exchange, the Taliban wouldn’t allow Islamic State, al Qaeda and other radical jihadist groups to operate in Afghanistan. They would also enter talks in Norway with Afghan government representatives and other Afghans on a permanent cease-fire and how the country will be ruled.
—Ehsanullah Amiri in Kabul contributed to this article.
PHOTO: RAHMAT GUL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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