US likely to ramp up operations against Taliban as Donald Trump says Afghanistan peace talks are ‘dead’
- General says military will pursue ‘whatever targets are available, whatever targets can be lawfully and ethically struck’
- US president still considering pulling troops from Afghanistan, saying ‘we’d like to get out but we’ll get out at the right time’
US President Donald Trump said on Monday that talks with Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders are off and that he was still considering a US troop drawdown in the country.
“They’re dead. They’re dead. As far as I’m concerned, they’re dead,” Trump said of the talks, speaking with reporters as he left the White House for North Carolina.
Months of US negotiations with the Taliban militants, who control large parts of Afghanistan, ended on Saturday when Trump abruptly announced he was cancelling secret talks at Camp David with the Taliban and the country’s president, Ashraf Ghani. The talks were aimed at securing an agreement to pull US troops out after nearly 20 years of war.
A draft accord agreed last week would have seen about 5,000 American troops withdrawn over coming months in exchange for guarantees that Afghanistan would not be used as a base for militant attacks on the United States or its allies.
There have been plenty of so-called bad people brought up to Camp David for meetings. And the alternative was the White House, and you wouldn’t have been happy with that either
Despite the Afghan government’s wariness of negotiating with the Taliban, Trump had hoped having both parties at the presidential compound in Maryland could produce an agreement.