(CBS) — In a series of tweets Saturday night, President Trump wrote that he called off a secret meeting at Camp David with the Taliban and canceled peace talks. The president wrote that the Taliban “admitted” to an attack in Kabul that “killed one of our great great soldiers” and 11 others.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday that the Trump administration has “made a lot of progress in convincing the Taliban to make some commitments that, frankly, we’ve been trying to get out of them for almost two decades now.”
CBS News reported on Friday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had postponed a trip to the U.S. but it had yet to be rescheduled.
“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. They were coming to the United States tonight,” Mr. Trump wrote in the first tweet.
Mr. Trump then wrote that “unfortunately, in order to build false leverage, they admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great great soldiers and 11 other people.”
A car bomb attack in Kabul on Thursday killed Sgt. 1st Class Elis A. Barreto Ortiz, 34, from Puerto Rico. A Romanian service member was also killed in the attack, as were at least 10 Afghan citizens. It was the second Taliban attack in Kabul in less than a week. The Taliban launched military offenses in three provinces last week.
The Taliban claimed the spike in attacks is justified to give them a stronger position in negotiations, CBS News’ Charlie D’Agata reported on Friday.
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