Trump blows off Taliban meeting

Trump reveals the tours in a series of Twitter posts the night of Sunday Swedish time.

"Without anyone knowing it, the most important Taliban leaders and, separately, the Afghan President would have secretly met me at Camp David on Sunday," he writes. "They were heading to the United States tonight," he adds, referring to local time on Saturday night.

The President continues that the meeting has now been stopped and the peace talks that have been going on for a long time at a lower level have been canceled. The reason is the attack in Kabul on Thursday that claimed twelve lives, including an American soldier, Trump said. "If they can't agree on a cease-fire during these very important peace talks, and even kill twelve innocents, then they probably won't be able to come to a meaningful agreement anyway," he writes.

The revelation is described in American media as sensational. The Taliban have been US enemies at least since they protected al-Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden after the September 11 coup, and in public it has never even been close to the news that any US president would personally sit down at the same table .

Just that US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has negotiated with Taliban leaders in Qatar's capital Doha has criticized it for giving the hard-line Islamist movement official recognition. After all, the brutal rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan was overthrown by US-led forces in 2001. So formally, they now have nothing to do with the country's leadership, although in practice they still control large parts of the country.

Trump's reveal draws on the playing field in several ways, not least before the presidential election in Afghanistan in three weeks. President Ashraf Ghani, who is running for re-election, has signaled skepticism about the US contacts with the Taliban in the election movement. The question is how is his position affected by the fact that Trump has now assumed he would have secretly attended the weekend's meeting himself.