Donald Trump and the Taliban negotiations: The backslider

Donald Trump once again wanted to play the big Dealmaker: In Camp David, where the leaders of Egypt and Israel once made peace, the US President wanted to create what his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama had failed to achieve: a peace solution for Afghanistan, the It would allow the US to withdraw its troops after 18 years of war in the Hindu Kush.

Although Trump had already promised to withdraw from Afghanistan during the election campaign in 2016, for many years as president he hardly paid any attention to the details. He left the talks with the Taliban to his special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. On Sunday, Trump at Camp David then wanted to meet in media discussions for separate talks with Taliban leaders and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

According to the New York Times, Trump himself has had the idea to meet with Taliban officials just before the eighteenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks in Camp David.

At the same time, however, when he made these plans public for the first time, he canceled the meeting and the peace negotiations via Twitter.

.... an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great great soldiers, and 11 other people. I immediately canceled the meeting and called peace negotiations. What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position? They did not, they ....

The US president justified the cancellation of the talks with the recent attack in Kabul last Thursday, in which twelve people were killed, including a US soldier. This argument is particularly credible: Elis Angel Barreto Ortiz was the 16th US soldier killed since the beginning of the year in Taliban attacks. The other 15 deaths had no impact on US-Taliban negotiations in Qatar's capital Doha.

The Taliban have not made any concessions

With Trump's public refusal, a negotiated solution moves into the distance. The talk of "peace talks" anyway was just a deception. The US was not primarily concerned with bringing about lasting peace in Afghanistan, but rather with getting an exit from the so-called war on terror in the Hindu Kush without losing face.

This was demonstrated, for example, by the fact that negotiator Khalilzad dropped two of the four points originally to be clarified in talks with the Taliban over time:

• the involvement of the Afghan Government in the negotiations with the Taliban,
• a permanent, nationwide ceasefire to which all militias and conflicting parties adhere.

Instead, the talks with the Taliban were only about the withdrawal of US troops and the assurance of the Islamists, in the future no more internationally operating terrorist organizations in Afghanistan to accommodate, especially al-Qaeda. An agreement on this basis alone would not have meant peace for the war-torn country.

There is much to suggest that Trump may only have realized in recent weeks that the Taliban has not made a serious concession in months of negotiations that the US president could sell as a success. Maybe that's why he was looking for an excuse to break the whole process. Thursday's attack would have been no more than an excuse.

Time is playing the Taliban in the hands

However, for the people in Afghanistan, the failure of the talks is bad news: "Both sides will probably continue to escalate the war," predicts Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network based in Kabul and Berlin. Already during the negotiations, both the Taliban and the US Army and their allies intensified their attacks. In the first half of the year, the Afghan government's troops killed more civilians than the Islamists. If Trump now argues that the Taliban unilaterally fueled the conflict, that would be misleading, according to Ruttig.

The Taliban probably know very well that the time is playing into their hands, because Trump wants to leave Afghanistan sooner rather than later. Even in the ranks of the Taliban, there are individual war-weary fighters, says Afghanistan expert Ruttig, but the organization is still extremely resilient. "You can not expect them to lay down their arms unless there is an agreement that, in their view, preserves the meaning of their struggle."

So the Taliban are counting on their most powerful opponent in Afghanistan, the US Army, to eventually leave the field, with or without agreement. Already, the Islamists are on the rise in many places. Once the American soldiers are out of the country, the overthrow of the government in Kabul is only a matter of time, so calculus.

Obviously, they hope for a repeat of the Soviet scenario: After the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, it took only three years for the mujahedeen, who had fought against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s, to topple Moscow's government in Kabul. In 1996, the Taliban finally took power.