Surprise Afghan visit by Trump
President visits U.S. troops for Thanksgiving, says he has reopened Taliban peace talks
BAGRAM AIR FIELD, AFGHANISTAN » President Donald Trump paid an unannounced Thanksgiving visit to U.S. troops in Afghanistan on Thursday and declared that he had reopened peace negotiations with the Taliban less than three months after scuttling talks in hopes of ending 18 years of war.
“The Taliban wants to make a deal, and we’re meeting with them,” Trump said during a meeting with Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, at the main base for U.S. forces north of Kabul.
“We’re going to stay until such time as we have a deal, or we have total victory, and they want to make a deal very badly,” Trump added even as he reaffirmed his desire to reduce the U.S. military presence to 8,600 troops, down from about 12,000 to 13,000.
Trump’s sudden announcement on peace talks came at a critical moment in the United States’ long, drawn-out military venture in Afghanistan, a time when the country is mired in turmoil over disputed election results and Americans at home are increasingly tired of an operation that began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The scope and prospects of any renewed negotiations remained unclear, and White House officials gave few details beyond Trump’s sudden revelation. On the flight to Afghanistan, Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, had insisted that the secret trip was “truly about Thanksgiving and supporting the troops” and “nothing about the peace process” with the Taliban.
The Taliban made no official comment immediately after the late-night visit and Ghani said little afterward about any peace talks. “Both sides underscored that if the Taliban are sincere in their commitment to reaching a peace deal, they must accept a ceasefire,” Ghani wrote on Twitter. “We also emphasized that for any peace to last, terrorist safe havens outside Afghanistan must be dismantled.”
But while the Afghan government has long demanded that the Taliban agree to a ceasefire, no evidence has emerged that the group
was willing to grant one. Instead, it has said it would discuss the possibility in negotiations with Afghanistan’s political leaders over the future of the country once the Americans agree to leave.
Trump made the visit, his first to Afghanistan, under a shroud of secrecy, arriving in a darkened airplane just after 8:30 p.m. local time and departing a few hours later on a trip that the White House had concealed from his public schedule for security reasons.
The president carried out the traditional role of feeding turkey and mashed potatoes to troops in fatigues, then dined, mingled and posed for photographs before delivering remarks celebrating the U. S. military before about 1,500 troops in an aircraft hangar.
But his visit also had an important political dimension. Trump, who angrily called off talks with the Taliban in September just as the sides appeared close to an accord, is searching for foreign policy achievements he can celebrate on the campaign trail over the next year. Several of his other marquee initiatives, including nuclear talks with North Korea and an effort to squeeze concessions out of Iran with economic pressure, have yielded few results.
During his short visit on the ground Thursday, Trump boasted of U.S. military successes against al
Qaida and the Islamic State and suggested that the Taliban was eager to make a peace deal, but that he personally was indifferent to the outcome.
“The Taliban wants to make a deal — we’ll see if they make a deal,” Trump said. “If they do, they do, and if they don’t, they don’t. That’s fine.”
He also said that the Taliban was willing to agree to a cease-fire pending the more extensive accord, a matter of contention in the earlier talks but one that Ghani’s government has insisted on.
U.S. diplomats have quietly tried to keep the peace process alive since Trump called off the talks, using small measures like a prisoner swap to build trust. In recent weeks, informal meetings between the two sides have been reported, though neither side had publicly acknowledged that peace negotiations had formally resumed.
Even after Trump broke off negotiations, the Taliban refrained from criticizing him too harshly, which analysts took as evidence that the group still wanted a deal with the United States.
Administration officials said Trump remained eager to bring an end to the U.S. role in Afghanistan, which costs billions of dollars each year and continues to claim American lives. This month, Trump visited Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to pay respects during the return of two Americans killed in a Nov. 20 helicopter crash in Afghanistan.
Some current and former military officials are worried that Trump’s appetite for a troop reduction he can boast about on the campaign trail as a fulfillment of his promise to scale back U.S. foreign interventions could lead to serious national security risks.
Gen. David Petraeus, a former commander of American forces in Afghanistan who is now retired, has warned that a premature withdrawal could lead to a Taliban conquest of the country, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., a close adviser to Trump on foreign policy, has said removing troops could “pave the way for another 9/11.”
Trump flew to Afghanistan on one of the modified blue- and-white 747 jets known as Air Force One when the president is onboard. He had flown to
Florida on Tuesday in another one of those planes but left it behind for his secret trip, which involved first flying back to Washington, where he boarded an alternate plane out of public view.
Grisham acknowledged that the White House had arranged for Trump’s Twitter account to post generic Thanksgiving messages while he was in the air to prevent an unusually long silence that might draw suspicion about his activities.
Joining Trump were his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney; the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien; and Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has regularly visited troops in Afghanistan on holidays.