How Trump trips up his own Afghan peace efforts
President Donald Trump gives an update on U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan at Fort Myer base in Virginia in 2017. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images
'Why would the Taliban give up anything in exchange for something the president has already said he wants to do?' asks one critic.
By
WESLEY MORGAN
08/16/2019 06:02 PM EDT
Updated 08/16/2019 07:16 PM EDT
President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the U.S. war in Afghanistan keep hitting a major roadblock: his own proclamations that he wants to get out.
Trump has repeatedly made it known he wants to remove all U.S. troops from the 18-year-old Afghan conflict, a topic he returned to Friday afternoon as his advisers briefed him on the status of peace talks with the Taliban.
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but his public statements and leaks of his closed-door demands have weakened the hand of his negotiators by making it clear just how desperately the president wants a deal, according to multiple current and former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the deliberations.
His top negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, is preparing for the ninth round of talks with the Taliban, seeking to reach a settlement that would allow the 13,000 U.S. troops still deployed to the country to come home.
Trump’s “known impatience and desire to get out have effectively forced Khalilzad to negotiate with one hand behind his back and given the Taliban an incentive to delay and harden their demands to see if they can get what they want for free,” said Christopher Kolenda, a retired Army colonel and Afghanistan veteran who has interacted unofficially with Taliban representatives.
For example, just weeks after Trump named Khalilzad as his top envoy to the talks in December, Trump blindsided his advisers with instructions to pull half of the American troops out immediately — an order he was then talked out of giving.
“You appoint someone to be your primary negotiator who’s empowered to carry out these meetings, and then six weeks later you tell everyone you’re handing your adversary half of what they want for nothing?” asked a former defense official who was working on Afghanistan issues at the time.
“The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was severely damaging,” agreed a current military official with recent experience in Kabul. “We’ve probably gone double the rounds [of negotiations] because the Taliban were like, ‘Hey, you’re leaving anyway. Why should we negotiate?’"
The two officials, and six others interviewed for this story, spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations over the peace process or troop drawdown plans.
Khalilzad briefed Trump on Friday on the progress of the negotiations. The closed-door meeting, which took place at Trump’s golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., was also attended by Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Secretary of Defense Mark Esper; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford; National Security Adviser John Bolton; and CIA Director Gina Haspel.
"Discussions centered around our ongoing negotiations and eventual peace and reconciliation agreement with the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan," White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley said in a statement. "The meeting went very well, and negotiations are proceeding."
"We remain committed to achieving a comprehensive peace agreement, including a reduction in violence and a ceasefire, ensuring that Afghan soil is never again used to threaten the United States or her allies, and bringing Afghans together to work towards peace," Pompeo added in a separate statement.
Trump's New Jersey retreat is the same venue where, two years ago, his national security team persuaded him to back additional troops and air strikes in Afghanistan in the hopes of forcing the Taliban to negotiate.
“My original instinct was to pull out, and historically, I like following my instincts,” Trump said in an August 2017 speech announcing that move.
The dilemma demonstrates the longstanding tension between Trump and the national security establishment over Afghanistan.
For more than two years the U.S. military headquarters in Kabul has waited anxiously for the presidential tweet, pronouncement or order pulling the rug out from under the 2017 strategy — the stated aim of which is to apply enough military pressure to the Taliban to bring them to, and keep them at, the negotiating table.
“You know there’s a shot clock, but you don’t know how much time is on it,” said one of the officials with recent experience in Kabul. “I hadn’t felt the politics before like I have this time.”
The biggest scare came last December when Trump ordered a pullout of troops from Syria, prompting the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Trump also declared that he wanted half the U.S. troops in Afghanistan withdrawn.
“The president said, ‘Let’s do this,’ and nobody was ready for that,” a former defense official recalled regarding the Afghanistan directive. “That caused quite a bit of consternation. The State Department was looking to [the Pentagon] like, ‘What is this drawdown,’ and we were like, ‘Uhhh?’”
In the meantime, Trump has mused publicly about the utility of staying in Afghanistan. “Why are we there and we’re 6,000 miles away?” he asked during a televised Cabinet meeting in early January.
