No Camp David Photo Op With the Taliban Ahead of 9/11 Anniversary, Trump Says

A significant
amount of news coverage was devoted Sunday to a bizarre
Twitter thread President Donald Trump posted the previous day about
Afghanistan.

The tweets announced that Trump was scrapping secret meetings
scheduled for Sunday and Monday at Camp David with the leaders of both the
Taliban and the government of Afghanistan.

Trump’s Twitter feed also said that peace negotiations,
which had been ongoing for a year, would come to an end due to the Taliban’s
continued attacks in Afghanistan. One of those attacks, a car bombing on
Thursday in Kabul, killed Sgt. 1st Class Elis Angel Barreto Ortiz, a
34-year-old paratrooper from Puerto Rico.

“Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders
and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with
me at Camp David on Sunday. They were coming to the United States tonight.
Unfortunately, in order to build false leverage, they admitted to…an attack in
Kabul that killed one of our great great soldiers, and 11 other people,”
Trump—or someone using his account—tweeted. “I immediately cancelled the
meeting and called off peace negotiations.”

The first question that arises from these tweets, given Trump’s
record of lying about everything, is whether such a meeting had even been
scheduled. The backstory
of the nine rounds of negotiations that have taken place between Taliban
leaders and U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is complicated, to say the least.

Last week, Khalilzad announced that a peace agreement had
been reached “in principle” that would allow the U.S. to begin withdrawing
a first round of troops from Afghanistan once the deal was signed. The
remaining U.S. troops would be withdrawn in about 16 months, a key campaign
pledge of former candidate Trump.

After that announcement, however, the Taliban carried out
several brutal attacks, including two car bombings in Kabul. And while the idea
of meeting Trump in the U.S. had been proposed, according to The New York Times, it’s not clear if
the Taliban had actually accepted and agreed on a date.

Additionally, the U.S.-Taliban agreement was not subject to
negotiations with Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, who announced on
Friday—before Trump’s tweets—that he was canceling a trip to Washington planned
for this week. So, was the agreement a non-starter before Trump’s tweets
yesterday? I have no idea.

Also weird was Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appearing on all five Sunday news shows to say this:

That brings me to my next question, which is much
simpler: Based on optics alone, who would schedule a meeting with the Taliban
at Camp David just two days ahead of the 18th anniversary of 9/11? (OK, to be fair, maybe this guy
would.)

Because there’s a tweet for everything, let’s check in with what Donald Trump would have said about that if it were
Obama negotiating with the Taliban (never mind bringing them to Camp David):

Here’s a good take:

Bizarre, indeed.