Trump blasts Taliban as nation marks 9/11
9/11 ANNIVERSARY
WASHINGTON • Donald Trump vowed to hit the Taliban “harder than ever” as the United States marked the 18th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that led to its longest war in Afghanistan.
The president also blamed the Taliban for the abrupt cancellation of planned peace talks at Camp David, which followed the death of a U.S. soldier in a suicide car bombing in Kabul last week. Speaking at the Pentagon, where he was marking the anniversary, Trump said: “We had peace talks scheduled a few days ago. I called them off when I learnt they had killed a great American soldier from Puerto Rico and 11 other innocent people.
“They thought they would use this attack to show strength, but actually what they showed is unrelenting weakness.
“The last four days, we have hit our enemy harder than they have ever been hit before, and that will continue. If, for any reason, they come back to our country, we will go wherever they are, and use power, the likes of which the United States has never used before.”
Trump said he was “not talking about nuclear power” but the Taliban “will never have seen anything like what will happen to them.”
For nearly a year Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy, has been negotiating with the Taliban on issues including a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Taliban guarantees to keep the country from again being used as a launch pad for global terror attacks. Trump has said he wants to withdraw around 5,000 of the 14,000 U.S. military personnel still in the country.
Fighting has picked up in several areas of northern Afghanistan, officials said on Wednesday, days after the talks collapsed.
Officials said there was fighting in at least 10 provinces, with the heaviest clashes in the northern regions of Takhar, Baghlan, Kunduz and Badakhshan, where the Taliban have been pressing security forces for weeks.
On Wednesday, security forces retook the district of Koran-Wa-Monjan in Badakhshan, the defence ministry said. The district, which fell to the Taliban in July, had offered the insurgents valuable mining revenues from its rich reserves of the famous blue lapis lazuli stone.