The New Yorker:

By Robin Wright

Eighteen years ago, after hijacked planes dive-bombed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it would have been considered delusional to imagine an American President sitting down with the jihadis tied to the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil—and at historic Camp David, no less. But it almost happened over the weekend, and may still. “Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday,” President Trump revealed on Twitter, on Saturday night. He both revealed and cancelled the summit in a furious series of tweets.

On the anniversary of 9/11, the United States is increasingly impatient, even desperate, to end the military offensive launched, in 2001, to oust the Taliban government from Afghanistan and eliminate the Al Qaeda terrorists it harbored. America’s longest war has, in the end, failed to expel the Taliban. The group now controls or contests more territory—forty-six per cent of the land, inhabited by a third of the population—than at any time since the U.S. intervention. (This spring, the Pentagon stopped assessing who holds what, which has long been a key barometer of U.S. success.) Today, any deal to withdraw U.S. troops will be premised on recognition that the Taliban have the right to a role in ruling Afghanistan.

All told, twenty-four hundred American service members have died in Afghanistan, another thousand NATO allies have been killed, and twenty thousand have been wounded. Since 2009, more than thirty-thousand Afghan civilians have been killed and fifty-six thousand have been wounded, most in insurgent attacks. In a startling shift that has occurred under the Trump Administration, the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan have been linked to more civilian deaths than the Taliban this year.

Diplomacy has wide support, for disparate reasons but one common truth. “Let’s not lose sight of the fact that after eighteen years of trying, it’s clear that a military defeat of the Taliban by U.S. and Afghan security forces is not a realistic option,” Andrew Wilder, an Afghanistan expert and the vice-president of the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Asia programs, told me.

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