Trump remarks surprise Taliban
Western diplomats, militant group caught off guard by call for cease-fire in conflict
KABUL, Afghanistan — After abruptly axing nearly a year of delicate peace talks with the Taliban in September, President Donald Trump put the negotiations back on the front-burner this week in a similarly jolting fashion by seeming to demand a cease-fire that his negotiators had long concluded was overly ambitious.
Despite a sense of relief at the prospect of resuming talks to end the 18-year conflict, Western diplomats and Taliban leaders were scrambling to figure out whether Trump had suddenly moved the goal posts for negotiations.
They were particularly confused by his remarks, made during an unannounced Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan, that the United States was once again meeting with the Taliban to discuss a deal but that “we’re saying it has to be a cease-fire.”
Demanding a cease-fire would amount to a big shift in the U.S. position and require a significant new concession from the Taliban — one that Americans have little leverage to extract.
For much of the yearlong talks, the Taliban and the United States were fundamentally on the same page: The Taliban wanted the Americans out of Afghanistan, and Trump has made no secret his desire to end what he has called the unending U.S. wars. But agreeing upon the details of a deal proved complicated.
In the agreement the two sides were on the verge of finalizing before Trump pulled the plug,
the best U.S. negotiators could get the Taliban to consent to was some reduction in violence. Discussions on a comprehensive cease-fire were relegated to future talks between the Taliban and Afghan leaders — only after the United States had pledged, and begun, to withdraw its troops.
But Thursday, Trump suggested the Taliban position had shifted.
“They didn’t want to do a cease-fire, but now they do want to do a cease-fire, I believe,” he said. “And it will probably work out that way. And we’ll see what happens.”
The Taliban seemed surprised by Trump’s declaration. While the group’s negotiators have held informal meetings with U.S. diplomats in recent weeks about ways to go back to the table, on Friday their leaders said their original position on a cease-fire had not changed.
“The Americans walked away from the negotiating table, and now the ball is in their side; it is up to them to come back if they want to solve this and get the document to signing and to the stage of implementation,” Suhail Shaheen, a member of the Taliban’s negotiation team, said. “Our positions remain the same.”
It’s unclear how U.S. negotiators could get the Taliban to agree to a cease-fire now, when they were unable to do so earlier.
The U.S. military has already begun scaling back its presence in the country, giving negotiators even less leverage than they had before. Last month, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin Miller, said the number of troops had been reduced by 2,000 over the past year.
Trump, on Thursday, said he was “bringing down the number of troops substantially.”
For the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, Trump’s statements were welcome. For months, Ghani had unsuccessfully tried to persuade Americans not to give away a U.S. troop withdrawal without a cease-fire because that would leave his government even more vulnerable.
The government has already been weakened by being excluded from the talks so far because the Taliban refuse to engage before a U.S. troop withdrawal.
The hope is that peace talks would eventually lead to direct negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan leaders over the political future of the country after the United States commits to withdrawing its remaining troops, currently about 13,000 or fewer.
Keeping the peace process alive after Trump canceled talks in September has required quiet, delicate diplomacy, including work that resulted in a prisoner swap and some reduction in violence.
Trump’s latest interjection in what has been a tedious diplomatic balancing act will once again have his negotiators scrambling to try to pull off what many Western officials have described as an unrealistic goal.
The Taliban see a cease-fire before the signing of a deal for the end of the U.S. military presence as an existential issue. They believe they will not be able to rally their forces again if they ask their fighters to stop fighting and then the deal breaks down.
But the government of Ghani has said negotiating the future cannot happen under the barrel of a gun, demanding a cease-fire as a precondition to any talks.
When Trump called off the talks, the Taliban realized they had pushed their hand too far by continuing to launch attacks just days before what was expected to be a signing of the deal. In recent weeks, U.S. diplomats persuaded the group to significantly reduce large attacks in the Afghan capital as part of the prisoner swap that saw the release of two hostages — one American and one Australian — in return for senior Taliban leaders.
But delivering a comprehensive, declared cease-fire is always going to be difficult internally for a movement that is trying to maintain unity as it negotiates potentially divisive issues.