Taliban talks are dead: Trump

The Taliban vows to continue fighting against US forces after Donald Trump said talks with insurgents were ‘dead’.

‘In terms of advisers, I took my own advice’: Donald Trump in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

The Taliban has vowed to continue fighting US forces in Afghanistan after President Donald­ Trump said talks with insurgents were “dead”.

Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said on Tuesday that Washington would regret abandoning negotiations. “We had two ways to end occupation in Afghanistan,’’ he said, “one was jihad and fighting, the other was talks and negotiations.

“If Trump wants to stop talks, we will take the first way and they will soon regret it.”

The Taliban’s statement came hours after Mr Trump said the US was walking away from negotiations after nearly a year of talks that aimed to pave the way for an American withdrawal from Afghanistan following 18 years of war. Mr Trump said that he was ramping the war back up.

“They are dead. As far as I am concerned, they are dead,” he said at the White House about the long-running attempt to reach an agreement with the Taliban and extricate US troops following 18 years of war.

The announcement followed Mr Trump’s cancellation of a top-secret plan to fly Taliban leaders in for talks at Camp David.

Driving another nail into the coffin of what had appeared to be nearly finalised negotiations, Mr Trump said that a US military onslaught on the guerrillas was back up at its fiercest in a decade.

“Over the last four days, we have been hitting our Enemy harder than at any time in the last ten years!” he tweeted.

On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that “we’ve killed over a thousand Taliban in just the last 10 days”.

Mr Trump denied his sudden shifts on Afghanistan was causing turmoil.

Until this weekend, there had been steadily mounting expectations of a deal that would see the US draw down troop levels in Afghanistan. In return, the Taliban would offer security guarantees to keep extremist groups out.

But then, on Sunday, Mr Trump revealed that he had cancelle­d an unprecedented meeting between the Taliban and himself at Camp David, in retaliation for the killing of a US soldier by the Taliban in a huge Kabul bomb blast last week.

Many in Washington were shocked that the Taliban had been on the point of visiting the presidential retreat on the eve of the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Mr Trump denied any discord­ among cabinet members, including Vice-President Mike Pence. In a tweet, he accused­ journalists of trying “to create the look of turmoil in the White House, of which there is none”.

The President said he had no second thoughts about his action­s. “In terms of advisers, I took my own advice,” he said.

A big part of Mr Trump’s 2016 election victory and subsequent first term in office has been his determination to keep the US out of what he sees as unnecessary wars in Syria and other mostly Muslim countries. Getting out of Afghanistan was a top priority. It is widely thought that Mr Trump has been pushing for a withdrawal of US troops in time for his 2020 re-election bid.

The President repeated that he wanted “to get out by the earliest­ possible time”. However, whether because of last week’s killing of a US soldier, as he says, or due to wider misgivings, that goal now appears in tatters.

“They did a mistake,” he said of the Taliban’s deadly bomb attack­. Several Republican senat­ors concurred with the President’s decision on the talks.

AFP