Trump’s Taliban Gambit; What’s next after the cancellation of the Camp David talks?

"I would note the departure this week of National Security Advisor John Bolton, though inelegantly executed, is not a major problem. Ronald Reagan had six national security advisors and was one of the most successful foreign policy presidents in history."

 Conrad Black "President Trump made the correct decision in canceling the peace talks with the Taliban of Afghanistan. These were never really peace talks. They were surrender talks. The primitive and barbarous Taliban represented them as such and to underline the point, engaged in a number of bombing atrocities in a cluster to correspond with their ill-considered invitation to Camp David to discuss peace with the Afghan government.

"The American manager of these discussions⁠—the well-respected former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad—tentatively arranged for a complete American withdrawal from Afghanistan if the Taliban would promise not to tolerate any part of Afghanistan becoming a staging or training center for any external terrorist organization. Thousands of Taliban prisoners were to be released, and the arrangement was to be capped by an extended cease-fire, which the Taliban broke in a particular act of contemptuous bad faith just as the talks were to open at Camp David. The Afghan government was to join these talks for the first time. The Taliban has long regarded the Kabul government with extreme derision as puppets and stooges of the Americans.

"Khalilzad and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seem to have been acting on President Trump’s desire to fulfill his campaign intention to wind down the effort in Afghanistan. The president’s fidelity to his pre-election promises is admirable and part of his apparently unshakable hold on the loyalty of almost all his original supporters. But if that commitment becomes a fetishistic objective in itself and does not respond to changed circumstances, it can be self-defeating inflexible dogma.

. . . Afghanistan Isn’t Worth It

"The Taliban have never treated agreements with any seriousness; making and then brutally violating them is part of their modus operandi. Apart from being militant Islamists, they seem not to have any commitment to any behavioral norms; they are completely uncivilized merchants of terrorist violence and primitive dictatorship, opposed to scholarship, liberality, or any emancipation of women above the status of slave labor, chattels of their men, and involuntary breeding stock.

"The Taliban have almost no general public appeal and enjoy the support of less than 10 percent of the Afghan population. But Afghanistan is a country with very weak internal structures apart from tribal arrangements. Its vulnerability is that it is a rugged, landlocked country with practically no resources beyond basic agriculture and has never been worth the effort that
 would be needed for a stronger country to impose control over it." . . .

So sad: