'Trump made the right call in walking away from peace talks with the Taliban,' writes Peter Bergen for CNNOpinion. 'With the 9/11 anniversary this week, visuals of him meeting with the group that gave cover to Osama bin Laden would not have played well.'
Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is completing a book about President Trump's national security team and policies and has reported from Afghanistan for CNN since 1993. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump tweeted that"the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday." Trump then said that he had"cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations" because the Taliban had"admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great soldiers."
Trump can smell a bad deal when it is presented to him, and the deal that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his lead US-Taliban negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, is cooking up with the Taliban is a real stinker.First, it's just not possible to pick a worse moment to be cozying up to the Taliban.
Klobuchar: This isn't a game show, these are terrorists 01:48On Saturday, Trump tweeted about the Taliban,"If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks ... then they probably don't have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway." Quite so.
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