Many months of tough negotiations between US and Taliban officials came
to a draft agreement which some analysts believe was going to be
formally finalized as a peace deal this weekend. That will not happen.
President Trump took to Twitter on Saturday announcing that he has “called off peace negotiations” with the Taliban, citing anger over one of the Taliban’s car bombings in Kabul last week.
Trump also revealed that
he had planned secret talks with both Afghan President Ghani and
Taliban leaders at Camp David, but that in the course of his new
decision, he had canceled those meetings as well.
It is unclear, then, whether Trump’s saying he “called off” the
negotiations just refers to this weekend, or to the entire process. The
US State Department was unclear, and referred questions to the White
House.
Trump’s meeting with Ghani was meant to sell his government on the peace process,
and by all indications the Afghans were warming to the idea. It’s not
clear why Trump isn’t meeting Ghani, who apparently made his way to the
US for the secret talks.
It’s not clear where negotiators would even go from here after Trump’s
move, since by all accounts the deal was already reached and just not
finalized. There aren’t really additional issues to tackle, and Trump
didn’t appear to be making new demands as much as railing at past
behavior.
There is also no real alternative to the deal for the US, since the war
is plainly being lost, and has been for awhile. In absence of a deal to
withdraw, the US may simply be waiting for an outright military defeat.
My bet is that Bolton, Pompeo, and their underlings once again persuaded Trump to yank chaos, death, war, and environmental devastation from the jaws of peace.
Hey, Trump is the one responsible for giving Pompeo and Bolton their jobs, right?
Snatches infailure from the clutches of success
“Trump Calls Off Taliban Peace Negotiations”
The ONLY POWERFUL Zionists’ Controlled AMERICAN MILITARY, Neo Cons etc., etc., Knocked Out President Trump, by forcing him to cancel Peace Negotiations, which President Trump Did to Avoid President John F. Kennedy’s Fate.
Doesn’t seem to me that the “gloves” are that off between Trump & military. More like Trump’s pique with the Taliban for sullying Trumps big accomplishment & stealing his thunder with the blast. I predict he will “get over it” within a week or two, and then go the next step of trying to sell it to the puppets we are supporting i.e. the “elected” government of Kabul… Probaby offer them waterfront places in SoCal and a million a year for support.. They won’t be safe in Afghanistan!
We know how the US will finally leave Afghanistan. There is a play about it, Miss Saigon, featuring the helicopter from the Embassy rooftop lifting off from the stage. That is the only way the US leaves. The Taliban seems to know that, and seems on course to make it happen. They haven’t let up just to talk to Trump.
Does “The Christmas Bombing of Hanoi” recall how the U.S. negotiated back then.” under Neocon Kissinger?????
Taliban gave them a choice, leave like 1989 or 1914, your choice.
They obviously chose 1914.
Just like Nixon in Vietnam. Trump can’t accept the fact that the Taliban aim to win the war and take Kabul once the US is gone. 50 years ago negotiations to end the Vietnam war dragged on for years because Nixon and Kissinger could not accept the fact that the NLF and the North Vietnamese would fill the vacuum when the US troops left. Like in Vietnam, the US needs to accept that it has been defeated and get out and move on.
Unfortunately, Nixon invaded Cambodia and Laos, bombed North Vietnam and defoliated most of South Vietnam in a vain and hopeless attempt to deny the reality of the US defeat. I hope Trump does not follow in Nixon’s footsteps.
Nixon was barely in office before the North got the NLF to effectively liquidate itself in the Tet offensive. They didn’t want any competition for rule from Hanoi when they came marching in.
Do you really believe that it was that primitively simple?
The son of Skywalker must not become a historian.
First of all the February 1968 Tet offensive happened nearly a year before Nixon took office.
More important, Vietnam was always one nation. Neither the NLF nor the DRV ever believed differently. From 1958 the NLF and the PAVN were under joint command of the North. South Vietnam was a fictional state created below the temporary 1954 ceasefire line between the Viet Minh and French forces by the Geneva Accords. Eisenhower reneged on his commitment under the Geneva Accords to hold a plebiscite on unification in 1956. At the time Eisenhower explained his refusal because he said he expected that 80% of the Vietnamese would vote for unification under Ho Chi Minh.
For political and propaganda purposes, the North Vietnamese sometimes cultivated the fiction that the NLF was independent of the North. And some people in the US antiwar movement bought into that fiction. But the NLF and the DRV shared the belief that Vietnam was one country.
The Viet Cong were hardly liquidated in the Tet Offensive. In fact, in 1975 the Viet Cong headquarters at Loc Ninh, (75 miles northwest of Saigon) was supplied by an oil pipeline from the North and paved roads that had replaced the Ho Chi Minh Trail after the US withdrawal before the liberation of Saigon. Following the end of the war, the NLF was abolished, having served its purpose and the country was reunited under the DRV.
The NLF was a popular front that included a broad range of Vietnamese groups. And the NLF was indigenous in the sense that all Vietnamese were indigenous. The anti-imperialist wing of the New Left in the 1960’s and 1970’s understood that the Vietnamese were fighting to unify their country, not to maintain the fictional division imposed by Eisenhower. From the Vietnamese standpoint, the Vietnam War against the US was a continuation of the struggle against the Japanese, French and Americans for national liberation of the entire Vietnamese nation.
Nice reply. Further, it would be quite impossible to find a war where, within choices of sacrificing troops, it wont be claimed an ally made a decision to sacrifice a particular social group for their own political gain. All soldiers everywhere in time are fodder.
“First of all the February 1968 Tet offensive happened nearly a year before Nixon took office.”
Yep. For some reason I had ’69, rather than ’68, in my head.
“From 1958 the NLF and the PAVN were under joint command of the North.”
And the North used that joint command to substantially liquidate the NLF in the Tet offensive so there would be no “broad range” of Vietnamese groups left which might have the gall and temerity to disobey, or the arms to oppose, whatever orders Hanoi cared to issue once the Americans were defeated.
The notion that the North Vietnamese betrayed the VC is a revisionist myth. What are your sources?
It didn’t happen that way. The NLF was fighting for a unified Vietnam under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh and his successors. The liberation of Saigon was “Mission Accomplished” writ large in bloody red Vietnamese characters. The NLF served its purpose and Vietnam became one country again.
Americans from the anti-war movement were in contact with the Vietnamese in the North and the South. We knew what they were thinking. They dug Ho Chi Minh and his government.
It was Kissinger who insisted that the negotiations pretend that there would be a transitional provisional government to give Nixon cover so the US wouldn’t look like a “pitiful, helpless giant” in the eyes of Nixon’s red state base. The North Vietnamese played along. But it was all a pretext. The North Vietnamese negotiators would say or promise anything to get the Americans to leave. Even pretending that the PRG represented something other than the Hanoi led liberation front located in South Vietnam.
And who “liquidated” the NLF forces? It was the US, and the ARVN, not the North Vietnamese, who killed hundreds of thousands of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops and maybe 2 million civilians. The Vietnamese estimate that 1.1 million total Viet Cong and North Vietnamese fighters died in the conflict to reunify Vietnam from 1955-1975. It is true that hundreds of thousands of VC fighters sacrificed their lives in the war for independence. But so did hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese troops.
The Viet Cong were far from finished after the Tet offensive. Tet was intended to demoralize the American invasion force and the ARVN. Tet was also intended to show the American people that we had been lied to by our government and media who claimed that the VC had been nearly wiped out and a South Vietnamese victory was imminent. Tet achieved its goal by demonstrating the strength of the guerrilla forces and their ability to strike anywhere and everywhere at once, even at the US embassy in the heart of Saigon. The Tet offensive was never intended to hold territory.
After Tet the VC did some serious ass kicking up to and including the final offensive in 1975. Just ask any member of the WSO or VVAW who was there.
I Can’t Stand All the Winning, pt 154. Or, do all these flip flops come in wingtips?
Have you ever worked for someone you have to tip toe around because they’re unpredictable, petty, and change their mind daily on how things are going to work from here on out? It sucks.
Unbelievable… they say the US is giving up everything and the Taliban is giving nothing. Yet their only demand is supposedly something the Trump admin very much wants! If Trump wants to understand what kind of person would kill people for leverage, he need only look in the mirror.
There goes the Nobel Peace Prize down the drain, at least for the time being. President Carter got one at Camp David hence President Trump must get one at Camp David.
“I immediately cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations,” Trump wrote in a tweet Saturday.“What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?”
Is this guy fu*king serious? Does he think all those sanctions he’s imposing doesn’t result in any deaths? Eleven people haven’t lost their lives in just say Iran and Venezuela since the village idiot decided to destroy countries economically? But fear not Donald, it’s working. All your idiot followers are still touting you not starting any new wars. MAGA.
I don’t even believe the Taliban did the car bombing. It doesn’t make sense from their perspective.
First of all, the Taliban is a guerrilla insurgency that does not have a centralized command structure. So individual commanders or warlords have a lot of initiative and have their own agendas. That has been an issue in the negotiations because it is not always clear if the negotiators for the Taliban represent the fighters on the ground.
Second, like the Vietnamese, the Taliban’s goal is to take power, not to share power with US puppets. This attack could be a way of warning the US that the Taliban will continue to wage civil war against the Afghan government until the Taliban replaces that government.
The lesson for the US is to just get out and move on. Let the Afghan people determine their own destiny, through negotiations or war. But the US has no role to play in Afghanistan’s future.
Or, where’s Eric Prince?
Yup, he’s seriously nuts.
“It is unclear” if any of the WH story is true. It is possible spanky preferred to play golf instead.
Yup, let’s leave our “heroes” there for some more time so more will day. Makes sense–if you’re trump.
The meetings may have been secret for us but you can safely bet that the intelligence agencies of Russia and China knew well ahead of this announcement.
Marx was right that things have an economic basis, and peace is bad for business. The MIC and related industry, along with Israel are the real benefactors of US foreign policy. And, it’s all fuelled by campaign contributions in Wash. which sets policy and agendas. The Afghans will never give up, and that’s good for those who profit from the war. Afghanistan is the dream country to keep a war going. Same with the Vietnamese in the past. They didn’t give up either, but the US ran out of money and had to go on Federal Reserve Notes, which amounts to fiat money. Today, Wash. will just keep borrowing money until the whole economy collapses to benefit the few over the vast majority of Americans.
Well, so much for Trump and his “negotiations”. Evidently someone from the CIA pointed out that if the troops leave, the heroin dries up and we can’t have that now, can we?
Can we stop printing stuff about how we’re “near peace in Afghanistan”? That ain’t gonna happen. We’ve been there for 18 years and besides the neocons need troops and air bases there for the upcoming war with Iran.
You mean there’s not gonna be any fake-peace? Aww man….
Stay tuned next week…..
Just pack it all up and leave, and make the CIA pay for their own security for their poppy fields, etc. Enough on BOTH sides have died for this lie of a war.
Well it’s either inevitable defeat or saving face with a deal. Either way the Taliban wins and the US forces will be forced out whether be in six months or a few years.
The deal has been done but there was too much push back in DC to publicly announce it near Sept 11 anniversary (as if the Taliban were responsible for that somehow) and trumps lot couldn’t figure a way to spin it.