President’s Trump’s split with former national security adviser John Bolton could foreshadow an effort to revive the Taliban peace talks that delivered the final blow to the pair’s strained relationship.
“Perhaps Trump will seek a pause in Taliban violence, claim the Taliban are now serious, and continue his unilateral withdrawal,” Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute told the Washington Examiner.
Trump ended the talks after a Taliban car bombing last week killed 12 people, including an American soldier, amid his secret efforts to host the terrorist group’s leaders at Camp David. But Trump has favored a U.S. withdrawal from the country for years, and Bolton’s departure removes the leading internal opponent of the effort to strike a bargain with the Taliban.
“I think now, people just wait for the dust to settle,” James Carafano, vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy and an adviser to the Trump team during the presidential transition, told the Washington Examiner. “I think from the U.S. perspective, the deal is still on the table.”
Trump has taken a hard-line posture in public. “The talks with the Taliban are dead,” the president told reporters Tuesday. “When they did what they did, in order to create what they thought was a better negotiating stance, I said, ‘That’s the end of them. Get them out. I don’t want anything to do with them.’ And they’ve been hit very hard. And I know for a fact they said that was a big mistake that they made, and it was. But that was my decision. And what we’re doing now is my decision.”
But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who appointed Zalmay Khalilzad to lead the U.S. negotiating team last year, left the door open to a renewal of the talks during a round of Sunday morning talk show appearances.
“I hope we get them started back,” he told Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday. “It will ultimately be up to the Taliban. They have got to demonstrate that they are prepared to do the things that we asked them to do in the course of those negotiations.”
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The Taliban has conducted deadly attacks throughout the negotiating process. The Thursday bombing that killed an American soldier, however, took place just days after Khalilzad announced that he had forged an “agreement in principle” to withdraw part of the U.S. military contingent in the country in exchange for a pledge that the Taliban would not allow al Qaeda to stage terrorist attacks from Afghanistan.
“That Bolton is gone signals one less roadblock on the road not only to an Afghan withdrawal — when Trump does his usual about-face — but also to a Syria pullout,” Rubin told the Washington Examiner.
Rubin, one of the Republican foreign policy experts who declared Trump “utterly unfitted” to be president, has been a sharp critic of Khalilzad’s efforts. He regards the reported agreement as little more than a “surrender” that could lead to a collapse of the Afghan government’s security forces.
The deal was supposed to set the stage for a round of negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan central government, which the terrorist group has refused to acknowledge throughout the 18-year war. Pompeo declined to sign the preliminary pact, a gesture perceived as a sign of his distaste for the agreement, but he defended the idea of a Camp David meeting in the face of Bolton’s objections.
“Pompeo is playing a very delicate game here,” Rubin said. “He knows that both the process and Khalilzad’s proposed deals are fatally flawed, but President Trump is committed to the process.”
Carafano is more supportive. He suggested that Khalilzad only agreed to a troop reduction that Trump has been hoping to orchestrate even without an agreement. “The dirty little secret here: It’s not like the Taliban are negotiating some amazing U.S. force reduction, because that was the number they were going to go to anyway,” he said.
His assessment of Pompeo’s posture is similar to Rubin’s, insofar as both analysts perceive the top U.S. diplomat as trying to strike a balance between Trump’s desire to leave Afghanistan and the national security threats that have made the conflict America’s longest war.
“Pompeo’s been the guy halfway between Bolton and the president on this,” Carafano said. “Pompeo is the guy who says, ‘How do we meet the president’s [objective] and, on the other hand, don’t compromise our national security interests?’ He’s been the facilitator here. He hasn’t been the naysayer here.”
