38 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
remaining eighty-six hundred would
leave within the next year and a half.
The Taliban, for their part, would break
with Al Qaeda, which still has a lim-
ited presence in some parts of the coun-
try, and help prevent other terror groups
from gaining a foothold there. They
would also begin negotiations with the
Afghan government and other stake-
holders in Oslo, Norway, for a durable
political settlement.
In the U.S., the arrangement came
under immediate criticism. In an open
letter, John Negroponte and other
high-ranking diplomats warned that
pulling troops out before a reconcilia-
tion between the Afghan government
and the Taliban risked “total civil war.”
The retired general David Petraeus—
McMaster’s former boss in Afghani-
stan—predicted that the Taliban would
attempt to “overthrow the Afghan gov-
ernment and reimpose medieval rule,”
thereby energizing “Islamist extremism
worldwide.” Senator Lindsey Graham
cautioned that a withdrawal could “pave
the way for another 9/11.”
Supporters of the deal viewed it as
the best one that the U.S. was likely to
get—and immensely preferable to no
deal at all. A Western consultant who
had been helping to prepare the Oslo
talks told me, “The Taliban have always
said, ‘We will never negotiate the fu-
ture of Afghanistan while foreign troops
have their boots on our soil.’ They com-
promised on that, and that’s huge.” Lau-
rel Miller, the Asia program director
for the nonprofit International Crisis
Group, said that securing the Taliban’s
commitment to sitting down with the
Afghan government in Oslo was “a
major achievement.” Miller also noted
that few people had seen the precise
terms of the accord, and that its most
vociferous detractors were likely not
among them. “Those are people who
only believe in a peace process that is
tantamount to the Taliban negotiating
its surrender,” she said. “And that’s not
going to happen.”
Suhail Shaheen, the spokesman for
the Taliban in Doha, told me that Khalil-
zad and the lead Taliban negotiator had
initialled a draft of the agreement and
deposited it with the Qataris; an offi-
cial signing ceremony was scheduled to
take place in Doha, in mid-September.
The Oslo talks would begin shortly af-
terward. Khalilzad had arranged to brief
America’s coalition allies at NATO head-
quarters, in Brussels. President Ghani
had selected delegates to represent his
country in Oslo, and the Norwegians
had rented a wing of a hotel on a hill-
side overlooking the fjords.
On September 7th, Trump tweeted,
“Unbeknownst to almost everyone, themajor 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 admit-
ted to an attack in Kabul that killed one
of our great, great soldiers, and 11 other
people. I immediately cancelled the meet-
ing and called off peace negotiations.”
Americans and Afghans alike were
stunned. On the one hand, the prospect
of such a summit, on the eve of Sep-
tember 11th, seemed quixotic and un-
seemly. On the other hand, Trump’s con-
tention that he had scrapped a year’s
worth of painstaking diplomacy because
of one American fatality was suspect. It
was also hard to ignore the hypocrisy:
after Trump’s tweet, Mike Pompeo told
CBS that the U.S. had “killed over a
thousand Taliban in just the last ten
days”—which, he said, had been “nec-
essary to get the negotiated outcome
that we’re looking for.”
A more plausible explanation for
why Trump rescinded his Camp David
invitation is that the Taliban had de-
clined it. Shaheen told me that, when
Khalilzad said Trump wanted them to
fly to Washington, they replied that they
would do so only after the agreement
had been signed. “We said that we will
close this chapter—the chapter of hos-
tilities—and then we can start a new
chapter, which will be one of coöpera-
tion,” Shaheen said.
If Trump had been hoping to strong-
arm the Taliban into accepting last-min-
ute changes, or to stage a public rap-
prochement between them and Ghani,
he grossly underestimated the situation’s
delicacy. A former diplomat told me,
“The idea that purportedly Trump had
for Camp David—that he was going
to be shuttling back and forth between
Ghani and the Taliban, even though no
preparation had been done for discus-
sions at that level—it’s insane.”
But why did Trump shut down the
entire peace process? It’s possible that
he’d always been ambivalent about the
deal, and his misgivings ultimately pre-
vailed. Or he might have wanted to
punish the Taliban for snubbing him.
In recent weeks, Khalilzad has at-
tempted to salvage the peace process,
travelling to Pakistan to meet with the
Taliban, who remain willing to sign the“At what point does it stop being sustainable?”