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In the days leading up to the anniversary of 9-11, U.S. President Donald Trump sent out a bizarre tweet claiming that he had just called off a secret summit at Camp David. According to Trump, senior leaders of the Taliban along with President Ashraf Ghani and Afghan Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah were about to jointly announce the signing of a peace deal.

This would have fulfilled one of Trump’s key election campaign promises to bring an end to America’s longest running war. Trump also made a lot of noise at the time about how he was going to win the war in Afghanistan, because despite his absolute absence of any military experience, he is somehow a self-proclaimed master strategist.

Now Trump claims that on the eve of him making what would have been a landmark announcement, he called off the Camp David meeting and shut down the peace talks completely.

“They are dead.” Trump tweeted, referring to the status of peace negotiations with the Taliban.

Trump’s claim that senior Taliban leaders were to be on hand, on American soil to announce the deal was somewhat startling. However, the fact that the U.S. has been holding peace talks with the Taliban was not news. For the past 18 months, U.S. negotiators led by former Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad have been taking place in Doha, Qatar.

The fact that these discussions were taking place without any inclusion of representation from the impotent tag team of Ghani and Abdullah is certainly telling. By excluding the corrupt cabal, which the U.S. has installed in Kabul and propped up for the past 18 years means that the U.S. senior leadership has given up on the Ghani- Abdullah regime.

The real power struggle in Afghanistan has always been between the U.S. and the Taliban since America initially invaded in 2001. Despite all the rhetoric and effort put into arming and training the Afghan security forces to be self-sufficient – and this includes more than a decade long Canadian military contribution to the cause – the fact is that Afghan security forces remain all but useless.

The training and weaponry are not the problem, what they lack is the motivation to fight. While the Afghan soldiers wish to live in order to cash their U.S. provided paycheques, the Taliban fighters are more than willing to die for their cause.

Thus, while the U.S. currently maintains 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, and the Afghan security forces number around 400,000, the U.S. soldiers remain the Taliban’s biggest threat.

The plan being hatched in Qatar was to see the Americans withdraw all remaining 14,000 troops in exchange for the Taliban promising to never again allow Afghanistan to be used as a safe haven for foreign terrorist forces.

This agreement in principle must have scared the bejeezus out of Ghani and Abdullah because by its very nature, the deal surmises that the Taliban will be in control of Afghanistan the minute that the last U.S. soldier departs from the airfield in Bagram.

This was widely understood by Canadian soldiers who deployed to Afghanistan. Our soldiers fought, died, and were wounded propping up an Afghan regime so despised by its own population, that despite millions of dollars in weaponry and training, Afghan soldiers could not defeat their own countrymen.

But now with a single tweet Trump has called off those peace talks. The genesis for Trump’s sudden about-face was that the Taliban had set off a car bomb in Kabul, which had killed a “great, great” American soldier, along with a Romanian soldier and 11 civilians.

Despite Trump’s campaign promise to end the war, there are currently more U.S. troops in Afghanistan than when Barack Obama left office.

Trump will spin this whole cancellation and claim that this incident only proves he is still a master negotiator who was not intimidated by the Taliban’s continued campaign of terror. However, by calling off the peace deal he has committed American forces to an indefinite continuation of a war they could never win.

Time is definitely on the side of the Taliban, as they do not have four-year election cycles.