President Trump said Monday that peace talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan are over after collapsing last week.
“They’re dead. They’re dead. As far as I’m concerned, they’re dead,” Trump said outside the White House as he prepared to board Marine One for the first leg of a trip to North Carolina to view damage from Hurricane Dorian and hold a campaign rally.
He also defended his decision to invite the terrorist group’s leaders to Camp David.
“Camp David’s held meetings with a lot of people who would be perceived as pretty tough customers. The alternative was the White House but you wouldn’t have liked that either,” he told reporters. “Camp David has had many meetings people would not have considered politically correct.”
Asked about reports that some of his advisers, including National Security chief John Bolton, were against the idea, the president replied: “I take my own advice” and that the sitdown was all his idea.
“We had a meeting scheduled. It was my idea and it was my idea to terminate it. They [made] a mistake,” he said, referring to a Taliban attack last week that killed a US soldier.
And he repeated his assertion that the US could win in Afghanistan in a matter of days but that he did not want “millions and millions of people” to get killed in what would presumably be an escalation of hostilities.
US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad had been in negotiations for nearly a year with the Taliban’s political wing in Doha, Qatar.
But what had seemed like an imminent deal to end America’s longest war unraveled at the last minute.
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Trump tweeted Saturday night that he had canceled his planned meeting with the Taliban and Afghan leaders at Camp David this past weekend, just days before the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, which al Qaeda plotted in Afghanistan, where it had been given safe haven by the Taliban.
The insurgents are now promising more bloodshed.
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The Afghan government remains mostly on the sidelines of the US peace effort.
And as Trump’s reelection campaign heats up, his quest to withdraw the remaining 14,000 US troops from Afghanistan remains unfulfilled so far.
The president’s visit to North Carolina came on the eve of a special election in the state’s 9th Congressional District.
Allegations of ballot fraud caused the state’s Board of Elections to order a new election in the district after the final vote on Election Day found Republican Mark Harris ahead of Democrat Dan McCready by fewer than 1,000 votes.
Harris chose not to run again in the special election, and McCready will face Republican Dan Bishop, whom Trump supports.