Trump: US, Taliban talking again
President says he expects deal, visits troops in Afghanistan
BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan — President Donald Trump visited Afghanistan for the first time on Thursday, delivering Thanksgiving greetings to U.S. troops deployed here in the United States’ longest-running war and announcing that he had resumed peace negotiations with the Taliban.
Making an unannounced trip, Trump touched down at 8:30 p.m. local time at Bagram air base — the primary hub for U.S. air operations located outside the capital of Kabul — after secretly departing from Florida in the dark of night.
Trump has long wanted to draw down forces in Afghanistan, and he said during a meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that he had restarted peace talks with the Taliban that he had broken off almost three months ago, and was hopeful of brokering an accord.
“The Taliban wants to make a deal, and we’re meeting with them, and we’re saying it has to be a cease-fire, and they didn’t want to do a cease-fire, and now they do want to do a cease-fire,” Trump said. “I believe it’ll probably work out that way.”
The Trump administration appeared to be on the brink of striking a deal to jump-start the peace process in September, when the president extended and then canceled an invitation for Taliban rep
resentatives to come to Camp David to cement an agreement to reduce U.S. forces.
This is Trump’s second visit to a combat zone; he visited troops in Iraq the day after Christmas in 2018. Vice President Mike Pence made a surprise trip last week to Al Asad air base in Iraq, where he served turkey and greeted troops.
Addressing about 1,500 military personnel assembled in an aircraft hangar here, Trump said, “We are winning like we haven’t won in a long time.”
He told the crowd he wanted to win the war in Afghanistan, and “we don’t play for ties,” but explained victory would not be achieved on the battlefield, but rather through “a political solution” determined by people in the region.
The president also served turkey to troops in a cafeteria and posed for photos with many of them.
Trump was on the ground at Bagram for about three-and-half hours after flying there overnight from the United States. His visit was shrouded in secrecy and kept off his public schedule, and aides took extreme security precautions to transport the commander in chief to Afghanistan.
Trump, who had been vacationing with family at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, flew from an undisclosed Florida airport after nightfall Wednesday to Joint Base Andrews near Washington, where he boarded Air Force One for the 13-hour flight to Afghanistan.
The president’s aircraft took off without lights and with its cabin window shades drawn shut to preserve secrecy. To limit suspicions about Trump’s whereabouts, White House staff members sent tweets from the president’s Twitter account during the time he was flying.
Air Force One descended and touched down at Bagram in complete darkness, and once on the ground, the president was flanked by combat troops wearing night-vision goggles and bearing rifles.
First lady Melania Trump remained in Florida, and the president was accompanied by a retinue of senior aides, as well as Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo. He was joined at Bagram by Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who already had been traveling in the region.
At Trump’s bilateral meeting with Ghani, he confirmed he would like to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 8,600 from about 13,000.
“We’ve made tremendous progress and at the same time we’ve been drawing down our troops,” Trump said.
Ghani told Trump that “Afghan security forces are taking the lead now.”
Trump’s visit had a political dimension, too. With House Democrats poised to impeach him for abusing his office and military leaders alarmed by his intervention in war crimes cases, Trump stood with cheering service members as a reminder that for all his troubles in Washington, he remains the commander in chief.
After Trump addressed a campaign rally-style crowd in the hangar, Ghani took the stage to heap praise on him.
Ghani celebrated Trump as the architect of a strategy that had helped weaken the Islamic State and al-Qaida, and personally credited him for the killing of IS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi — which Ghani suggested was more important than the killing of the former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9⁄11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
He also expressed gratitude to Trump for “your very principled decisions regarding putting limits on the type of peace that will ensure the gains of the past year and ensure your security and our security.”
Trump has questioned why the United States has kept troops in Afghanistan after nearly two decades of fighting, billions in aid, and more than 2,000 U.S. military lives have failed to transform the country.