Trump offers peace deal on a plate to the Taliban

Donald Trump has been conferring with his top advisers about the peace deal-in-the-making with the Taliban. Beside him were Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, Mark Esper, newish defence secretary, John Bolton, national security adviser, General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gina Haspel, CIA director. Did any of them while sat together at one of Trump's resorts have the courage to warn him aganst giving away so much to the Taliban? Both Trump and Barack Obama before him made the same huge mistake over Afghanistan. Obama finally, after lots of anguish, agreed to send more troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban but then set a timetable for their withdrawal. The Taliban must have been amazed. All they had to do was wait for that Obama withdrawal deadline to arrive and then get on with their business. Trump is now making the same mistake. He has called for negotiations with the Taliban and they have been going on for months. But he made it clear from the start that he wanted to end the war and bring all the US troops back home. Nothing wrong with that as a political vision but as soon as it was made clear by some stupid comments in Washington that Trump wanted it all to happen by the presidential election in 2020, Trump placed the US miitary and the negotiators in Qatar in an impossible position. Deadlines may make good political headlines but in the hard business of war and peace, you don't want to present the enemy with all the best cards. I think there will be a peace deal signed with the Taliban before the end of next year but it may well be a deal of shame, with the US giving and the Taliban taking. Trump may not be too worried. He knows that there are huge swathes of his supporters who want to see the war in Afghanistan brought to an end and all American troops back in their homes. They don't care about the Taliban who are not seen as a threat to the United States. They probably think al-Qaeda was finished once Osama bin Laden was killed. So why, they will be asking themselves, do we still have 13,000-14,000 troops in this Godforsaken country thousands of miles away? They will support Trump whatever the small print in the peace deal says. So the poor US peace negotiators will have to do their best with the worst hand. I simply cannot see the Taliban agreeing in writing to allow women in Afghanistan to retain all the human, civil and political rights they have won in recent years. And even if they agree, who is going to intervene if they renege on such promises when they gain access to a share of the power in the country? Will enough people in the world care? I fear not.