(The new york times): WASHINGTON \u2014 President Trump said on Saturday that he had canceled a secret meeting at Camp David with Taliban leaders and the president of Afghanistan and was calling off monthslong negotiations that had appeared to be nearing a peace agreement. \u201cUnbeknownst to almost everyone,\u201d Mr. Trump wrote in a series of tweets, Taliban leaders and the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, were headed to the United States on Saturday for what would have been a politically fraught meeting at the president\u2019s official Camp David retreat in Maryland. But Mr. Trump said that \u201cin order to build false leverage,\u201d the Taliban had admitted to a suicide car bomb attack on Thursday that had killed an American soldier and 11 others in the capital of Kabul. \u201cI immediately cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIf they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don\u2019t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway,\u201d Mr. Trump added. \u201cHow many more decades are they willing to fight?\u201d The president\u2019s announcement was startling for multiple reasons. A surprise summit at Camp David with leaders of an insurgent group that has killed thousands of Americans since the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan would have been a sensational diplomatic gambit, on par with Mr. Trump\u2019s meetings with the once-reclusive North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. A senior administration official said the meeting had been planned for Monday, just two days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which were plotted from Afghanistan and led to the United States\u2019 invasion of the country. Mr. Trump\u2019s statement also appears to scuttle \u2014 for now \u2014 his longstanding hope to deliver on a campaign promise to withdraw American troops from an 18-year conflict that he has called an aimless boondoggle. It comes amid stubborn resistance within Afghanistan\u2019s government about the peace agreement that had been under discussion, not only for security reasons but also because Mr. Ghani has been determined to preserve a planned Sept. 28 election, which he is favored to win. The Taliban have insisted on postponing the election before proceeding with negotiations with the Afghan government. Several people familiar with the diplomacy between the Trump administration and the Taliban puzzled over Mr. Trump\u2019s stated decision to cancel peace negotiations entirely in response to one American casualty, however tragic. The Taliban had not agreed to halt their attacks on Americans in advance of a formal agreement. That raised the question of whether Mr. Trump might have been looking for a pretext because the talks had run into trouble. The development is sure to inflame a Washington political debate about the talks that until now had largely played out in national security circles to little public fanfare. Mr. Trump had been coming under growing pressure from conservatives not to hastily exit the country while many leading Democrats have said they support peace talks leading to an American withdrawal. Many details of the scrapped Camp David meeting were unclear on Saturday night. The senior Trump administration official said that the decision to cancel the meeting had been made on Thursday, but that Mr. Trump had delayed his announcement. On Friday, Afghan officials confirmed that Mr. Ghani postponed a planned meeting in Washington. One person familiar with the diplomacy said that the plan for a Taliban visit to Washington had not been under discussion until about a week ago. (Taliban representatives have not yet confirmed that they ever planned to attend such a meeting.) It was also unclear whether Mr. Trump\u2019s halt to the peace negotiations would be permanent. The president has reversed such decisions in short order before. In May 2018, for instance, he abruptly canceled his second summit with Mr. Kim, only to reschedule it days later. But several people familiar with the Afghan talks said on Saturday that it could be difficult to restart them. The negotiations have been underway since last winter, when Mr. Trump\u2019s special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, began regular trips to Doha, Qatar, for grueling sessions with Taliban representatives. United States and foreign officials said that the talks had reached an advanced stage and, until Saturday night, that an agreement with the Pashtun insurgent group that once harbored the Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden was close at hand. In nine rounds of negotiations, Mr. Khalilzad painstakingly worked toward what was described as a phased peace agreement \u2014 initially a deal between the United States and the Taliban that would open the door for direct negotiations between the Afghan sides, before all of it came together into a final Afghan peace deal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(The new york times): WASHINGTON \u2014 President Trump said on Saturday that he had canceled a secret meeting at Camp David with Taliban leaders and the president of Afghanistan and was calling off monthslong negotiations that had appeared to be nearing a peace agreement. \u201cUnbeknownst to almost everyone,\u201d Mr. Trump wrote in a series of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archived-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2027,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026\/revisions\/2027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}