Sunday, September 8, 2019

Camp David Discords

Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter, and Menachem Begin in Camp David, MD, 31 August 1978, via Wikipedia.



My take last night, that Trump was not the author and that something was really wrong with the story:
Actually Ghani had already cancelled.

But Kristof was mistaken in attributing the snag to poor Ghani, and I was right. The Taliban leadership has insisted that they have nothing to negotiate with the Kabul government about until such a time as US agrees on a timetable for withdrawing its own troops from the country (which is a big leap forward, negotiated by US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, from their previous position that they'd never negotiate with the Kabul government under any circumstances), and it's increasingly clear that they never agreed to come to Camp David at all.
“We promised there would be intra-Afghan talks once we finalized our agreement with the Americans,” a senior Taliban leader said. “If Trump and his administration think they would solve the confrontation between the government and the Taliban somewhere in Washington in a meeting, that’s not possible because we do not recognize the stooge government.”... The group said in a statement said it received an invitation in late August to visit the United States, but had put off a decision until the deal was finalized.
It seems Trump had really been allowed to believe that the meeting was going to happen today, or had persuaded himself; he stayed in Washington for the weekend, golfing at his Virginia course. CNN heard earlier this week that the State Department and National Security Council were working on a real plan for a meeting between Ghani and Taliban representatives somewhere in the US sometime this month, but I'm convinced that a lot of the details spring out of Trump's own personal fantasy: he's thinking of the Camp David talks between Israel and Egypt in 1978, when President Carter had to shuttle back and forth between Begin's and Sadat's cabins because the two couldn't stand being in the same room, and everybody got a Nobel Prize:
A source familiar with details of the meeting told CNN the plan had been for Trump to meet separately with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and with the Taliban's chief negotiator, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. If Trump's meetings had gone well, the hope was to convince the two Afghans to meet face to face.
You can imagine how much better Mr. Art-of-the-Deal thinks he'd be than Carter at the job. He'd have a peace deal worked out before sunset.

So when he got back from the golf course yesterday afternoon (at 3:42) he was surprised and angered to learn that he wasn't going to Camp David to pick up his Nobel after all, and retired in dudgeon for the next three hours with whoever helped him compose that Twitter thread (I'm guessing John Bolton, because this is the outcome he's been looking for) to cancel not only the imaginary Camp David meetings but the entire dialogue Khalilzad has been working on for a full year and which probably constituted the only positive achievement of the Trump regime in foreign policy to date, just because everybody was so mean.

And now, naturally, time for everyone in the White House to come out and start lying about what just happened.

Update: I doubt Frum is ripping me off, but his version certainly resembles mine:
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