Trump without Bolton: More missteps ahead?

IN A recent segment of his HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, the popular American comedian pulled out an oversized, fake book called If Obama Did It.

Filled with things President Donald Trump has done, the book invites the reader to imagine the consequences if President Barack Obama did these very things during his two terms in office.

More specifically, it asks how the Democratic president's Republican critics, including a famous New York real estate tycoon, would have reacted.

Leading the list of presidential moves - in addition to the bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin and consorting with the Kremlin - were the unsuccessful diplomatic talks with North Korea's Kim Jong Un and the decision to give his children and son-in-law Jared Kushner security clearances over the objections of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Picture the following: President Obama inviting representatives of the Taliban, a terrorist organisation and former ally of Al Qaeda, to meet him in Camp David, the iconic presidential retreat in Maryland, and doing this - no less - around the anniversary of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

The response from President Obama's adversaries on Capitol Hill and in the media would have been swift and punishing. President "Hussein" Obama would have been accused of befriending Muslim terrorists responsible for the deaths of around 3,000 Americans and be portrayed as nothing short of a traitor.

Some of the president's haters - such as Mr Trump, erstwhile leader of the "birther" movement that insisted that the then-White House occupant was born in Kenya - would have insinuated that Mr Obama was a Muslim himself and that, who knows, he and the Taliban representatives might even have been performing daily Muslim prayers at Camp David together.

President Obama would have been impeached immediately and been charged with treason against his country. (Well, since he was not born in the USA, it wouldn't really be his country).

The sad and funny thing is that the above scenario is not far-fetched and could have unfolded if President Obama had met secretly to negotiate a deal with Taliban officials on ending the war in Afghanistan. He needn't have done it at Camp David or before the 9/11 anniversary; the meeting could have been in, say, Doha or Vienna.

President Trump had actually been planning to do just that - meet Taliban representatives and with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani at Camp David this week - until he tweeted that he was cancelling what were supposedly secret sessions following a Taliban-claimed attack in Kabul last week, which killed a US service member, a Romanian soldier and 10 Afghan civilians.

The irony in all of this is that notwithstanding the negative "optics" of schmoozing with terrorists just before Sept 11, President Trump was in a sense engaged in a process that had commenced under his predecessor. Note though, that when President Obama got that process underway, the Donald had lashed out at him for holding "negotiations with our sworn enemy the Taliban".

But after 18 years of war, President Trump, not unlike President Obama, wants to end the longest continuous military engagement in American history. He also aims to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, where more than 2,300 American servicemen (along with 150,000 or more civilians) have died and hundreds of billions of US dollars have been spent.

In fact, both the current Republican president and his Democrat predecessor ran for office criticising the decision to go to war in Iraq and the neo-conservative agenda of "regime change" and "nation building".

And both had pledged to end costly US military interventions in the Greater Middle East, despite strong resistance from the Pentagon and members of the Washington foreign-policy establishment.

Indeed, after several months of shuttling between Washington, Kabul and Doha, where he held talks with leading Taliban officials, Zalmay Khalilzad, President Trump's special representative to Afghanistan, has apparently helped finalise an agreement to end the war in Afghanistan. It was signed by both representatives of the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan, which could have been celebrated as an historic diplomatic achievement by the US president.

Although he blamed the terrorist action in Kabul for his decisions to withdraw his invitation to the Taliban and to cancel the Camp David meeting, it seems that the main reason for the move was the Taliban's reluctance to show up in Maryland before the deal with the Americans was signed, sealed and delivered in Doha.

President Trump, the showman, on the other hand, wanted to finalise the negotiations in Washington. It would have given him a media spectacle under which he would have been celebrated as the Greatest Deal Maker in the History of the World (and perhaps the universe).

But he has been facing far more difficult challenges in his quest to end America's military interventionist policy in the Middle East and, in another sense, to defy the axiom that the United States should serve as the world's policeman.

In reality, the majority of the Republicans on Capitol Hill and the conservative foreign policy crowd have been sceptical about his decisions to improve ties with Russia, to stay out of the Syrian civil war, to reach a nuclear deal with North Korea, to sign an agreement with the Taliban that would lead to US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and, most recently, to pursue diplomatic détente with Iran.

One of the paradoxes has been that President Trump nominated John Bolton - an architects of the Iraq War and an opponent of making deals with Russia, North Korea, the Taliban and Iran - as his chief national security advisor.

In public statements and private meetings, Mr Bolton made it clear his plans to trigger regime changes in North Korea and Iran, weaken President Putin's hold on power and to use the full force of the US military might to defeat the Taliban.

More specifically, he has actively lobbied against a deal with the Taliban and seemed intent on sabotaging plans to have President Trump and Iranian Prime Minister Hassan Rouhani meet, while encouraging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran's allies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.

So perhaps it was not quite surprising that President Trump fired him this week, saying that he "disagreed strongly" with many of the suggestions of his chief national security advisor.

The question everyone is asking in Washington is: With Mr Bolton out of the picture now, will President Trump would feel freer to make good on the commitments he made during the campaign, and move more aggressively to reduce the American military footprint in the Greater Middle East, including in Afghanistan - with or without a deal with the Taliban?