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“We’re working on an agreement now with the Taliban,” Trump said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.” “Let’s see what happens.”
The US praised the release of the professors, American Kevin King and Australian Timothy Weeks, with Trump tweeting on Tuesday, “Let’s hope this leads to more good things on the peace front like a ceasefire that will help end this long war.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement Tuesday, “We see these developments as hopeful signs that the Afghan war, a terrible and costly conflict that has lasted 40 years, may soon conclude through a political settlement.”
Taliban attacks
CNN has reached out to the White House about Trump’s comments.
“The last time I was supposed to have an agreement, they thought that when they came over they thought it would be good to kill people so they could, you know, negotiate from a position of strength,” he said.
Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad has traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan since the collapse of the negotiations, but the State Department stressed after the first trip that the “meetings do not represent a re-start of the Afghan Peace Process.”
Steve Killelea, the executive chairman of the Institute for Economics and Peace, which produced the report, said the Taliban “now account for 38 per cent of all terrorist deaths globally,” which he believes “underscores the difficulty with the current conflict” in Afghanistan.
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