Trump’s foreign policy by tweet would be funny if it didn’t mean more lives lost

Analysis: Afghanistan peace talks debacle shows dangers of White House’s on-the-fly policymaking

Donald Trump has astonished Afghanistan as well as Washington’s national security establishment by disclosing that he had first invited and then uninvited officials of the Taliban for a summit at Camp David, abruptly declaring a US exit from ongoing peace talks.

Predictably, Trump announced it all via Twitter, another example of the perilous and unpredictable fly-by-night foreign policymaking under his presidency. On Monday, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani sought to regain control of the peace process by telling a meeting of military leaders in Kabul that his nation were ready for peace talks, but that a ceasefire would need to be implemented.

“We are ready for peace talks but if the Taliban think they can scare us, look at these warriors,” Ghani said, declaring that peace could not be unconditional as he repeated demands for a truce that the Taliban have so far refused. “Peace without a ceasefire is impossible,” he added.

Trump’s now familiar shtick may be mildly entertaining and even relatively harmless when it’s directed at celebrities whom he accuses of not showing him enough deference. But when applied to sensitive foreign policy matters, the results can be disastrous.

In this case, the president’s apparent willingness to cut some kind of secret deal with the Taliban without the buy-in of the Afghan government, America’s partners in Afghanistan, including the UK, and possibly his own foreign policy team, will likely have serious consequences.

After Trump’s announcement, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo quickly went on the air to insist that months of ongoing, carefully assembled and closely watched peace talks were not “dead”, even though special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad had been recalled from the site of the negotiations in Qatar.

But quite possibly Pompeo had been kept out of the loop of Trump’s scheme to invite the Taliban and Ghani to the American president’s vaunted Maryland retreat for what appeared to be a handshake and photo opportunity, perhaps modelled on the 1993 Camp David meeting between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat brokered by Bill Clinton.

That the talks were scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks which were masterminded from Afghan soil suggests what little foresight, planning and vetting went into the proposed summit, if there was even one planned. It suggests the president has no sense of what his words might imply, and how they may complicate future peace efforts.

“The most important thing is not to be credulous about Trump’s claims,” Jarrett Blanc, a former official under US President Barack Obama, told The Independent. ”No meeting was going to happen at Camp David, so he called off the peace process for some other reason. Meanwhile tweeting about Camp David ... provides legitimacy without even having the meeting.”

The debacle resembled Trump’s announcement last year that he was immediately ordering US troops out of northeast Syria, shocking both Washington’s local allies and UK and French commandos battling Isis remnants alongside Americans.

That move unleashed shock waves across the Middle East and in world capitals. US officials announced resignations over what they described as a betrayal of Syrian Kurdish allies. Turkey, Russia, Iran, and the dictatorship in Damascus began planning their moves once the US withdrew its 2,000 troops, and hundreds of diplomats and contractors out of northern Syria.

But 10 months after the announcement, US troops remain in northeast Syria – even partaking in a high-profile joint patrol with Turkish colleagues on Sunday. US politicians and defence officials convinced Trump to first delay what they saw a disastrous and premature move, and then he seems to have lost interest in Syria.

By all accounts, Afghan officials and ordinary citizens are terrified that the US will throw them under the bus, abandoning them to fend for themselves against the Taliban which imposed a harsh, sectarian version of fundamentalist Islam when it ruled the country from 1996 to 2001.

Afghans may be temporarily relieved that Washington and the Taliban aren’t going to cut a new deal any time soon.

“The Qatar talks will not restore stability in Afghanistan and may plunge Afghanistan into a civil war,” warned the state-run Afghan newspaper Hewad. “Taliban attacks on different parts of the country showed that the Taliban are not interested in peace at all nor do they believe in peace.”

But Afghans are also bracing for a fresh increase in violence. While Ghani’s government welcomed the US decision to end talks, the Taliban declared that it would “continue to carry on the current jihad with the firm belief that the final victory will be ours”.

Faced with the uncertainty of an erratic patron in the White House, a shaky Afghan government in Kabul, and a resurgent Taliban – along with the local Isis affiliate lurking within the mountains – ordinary Afghans are voting with their feet. One third of Afghans have been displaced by war or forced to migrate since 2012, and indications from transit countries such as Turkey suggest they are heading in larger numbers towards western Europe.

Who can blame them. A report issued Sunday by the United Nations humanitarian coordination arm found 2 million Afghan children suffering from malnutrition.

“Ongoing hostilities across large parts of the country, including ground engagements, aerial operations, landmines and indiscriminate use of improvised explosive devices, often suicide attacks, continue to cause extreme levels of physical and psychological harm,” says the report. “Record numbers of civilian casualties were seen in 2018 and this trend has continued in 2019.”

A resurgent Taliban, and the perception that the US is on the precipice of cutting and running from Afghanistan, will exacerbate the country’s misery and violence, prompting a fresh new exodus toward Europe. Trump’s misguided attempt to extract some kind of glory from Afghan tragedy causes only more suffering, and ultimately makes it more difficult to achieve peace.