Five years ago today
He had been very pleased that they called him “your excellency” which he insists they never called any other president because they respected him so much you’ve never seen anything like it.
I still remember the shock at learning that Trump had secretly invited the leaders of the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11. It boggled the mind that he could even contemplate such a thing, although he’d been inviting Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duterte to the White House for years so why not? But to imagine the Taliban at Camp David on 9/11 was beyond imagination even for him.
It turned out that there had been ongoing peace talks that were designed to lead to the American withdrawal but Trump wanted the credit for “making the deal” so he came up with the Camp David proposition. In the end all it did was help destabilize the already fragile Afghan government (a major factor in the chaotic withdrawal in 2021) and Trump ended up releasing 5,000 Taliban fighters and agreeing to a timetable for US withdrawal with only a promise that the Taliban would be good boys in the future.
One gaping problem, say scholars (including some from the Trump administration): The peace agreement came with no enforcement mechanism for the Taliban to keep its word.
The Taliban basically had to sign a pledge saying it wouldn’t harbor terrorists. Nowhere did the Taliban have to — nor did it choose to — denounce al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that launched the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan, Miller writes. […]
To a number of those who were paying attention, the whole deal felt like a naked attempt to just get out of Afghanistan. It was a campaign promise of Trump’s to be the president who finally ended America’s longest war. It would be something no other president had been able to accomplish.
Before the peace talks really got going, Trump had already started withdrawing thousands of troops, and he fired his defense secretary, Esper, after he wrote a memo disagreeing. (Esper later said that Trump’s withdrawing too many troops too soon contributed to what we see now in Afghanistan.)
In the end, Trump got the best of both worlds as usual. He says he made the deal (which Biden adhered to) but Biden botched by not being “tough” and keeping troops in the country, which Trump had precipitously withdrawn.
It was always going to be a mess. But it was Biden who finally had the guts to follow through. But regardless of his desire to end that war, you can bet he never would have contemplated bringing the Taliban to Camp David on 9/11 so he could “make a deal” with them. Only Trump would consider something so stupid.
