Despite peace deal setback, U.S. will leave Afghanistan
Confused and contradictory, Washington’s decision to cancel a surprise U.S.-Taliban summit was classic Donald Trump.
That the U.S. had agreed in principle to a peace deal with the Afghan insurgents it has been fighting for 18 years was well-known. Talks between the two sides have been going on in one form or another since Barack Obama’s presidency.
Trump, who came to office on a promise to end America’s longest war, merely ramped up the pressure.
The deal in principle that his chief negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, inked with the insurgents last week was particularly favourable to the Taliban. Under the arrangement, the U.S. would withdraw 5,400 of its roughly 14,000 soldiers operating in Afghanistan within 20 weeks. The rest would be sent home sometime later.
The Taliban’s only ironclad obligation was a promise to prevent groups like Al Qaeda from launching terror attacks on the U.S.
Neither side was even required to impose a ceasefire.
The deal in principle was particularly bad for the U.S.-backed Afghan government. At the Taliban’s insistence, it was deliberately excluded from the talks.
As well, the deal would have left many Afghans, whom the U.S. had promised to champion, including women and girls, high and dry.
But if signed, the deal would also have signalled the beginning of the end of a long and pointless war. So it did have something going for it. And then Trump got involved. According to the New York Times, his administration was deeply split. Then national security adviser John Bolton was opposed to any deal with the Taliban. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was not.
Somewhere along the line, Trump got it into his head that a formal signing at Camp David, his presidential retreat, would be just the thing. He also decided to invite Afghan President Ashraf Ghani along.
There were some problems with this. First and foremost, the Taliban doesn’t recognize Ghani and has refused to talk to members of his government. It considers him an American stooge.
Second, since the agreement doesn’t require a ceasefire, it allows both sides to keep on killing one another. According to Pompeo, the U.S. killed 1,000 insurgents over a recent 10-day period. Over the same period, the Taliban killed one American soldier.
All of these combined to derail the Camp David summit. The Taliban feared that including Ghani in the mix would make the deal politically unpalatable to their hard-line supporters. Trump fretted that welcoming an organization that had just killed an American soldier would be equally politically disastrous for him.
And so the surprise summit was cancelled. Taking a cue from hardliner Bolton, Trump blamed the Taliban and announced that all peace talks were off.
Then, for unspecified reasons, he fired Bolton.
As a piece of political theatre, the abortive Camp David summit reads like a parody of Trumpism, marked by conflict, seat-of-the-pants decisionmaking, dramatic U-turns and the U.S. president’s overweening desire to occupy centre stage.
But that the Americans were even considering this one-sided peace deal also speaks to their desperation to get out.
They and their allies, including Canada, made a fatal mistake by involving themselves in Afghanistan’s civil wars. They made the same mistake the British and Russians did before them.
Washington made promises to bring democracy and civil rights to Afghanistan that in the end it was unwilling to keep. The price in blood and money was just too high.
Trump may have sandbagged these particular talks with his shenanigans. But eventually the Americans will pull out of Afghanistan. Just as they pulled out of Vietnam.
They lost this war a long time ago. All they need do now is admit it.