Donald Trump makes surprise visit to Afghanistan: Talks with Taliban have been resumed

US President Donald Trump, after making a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Thursday evening, met American troops stationed in the area. He also gave his Thanksgiving greetings to them before attending a bilateral meeting with his Afghan counterpart Ashraf Ghani for a bilateral meeting.

Peace talks with Taliban revived: Trump

During the meet, Trump said that he has revived peace talks with the Taliban. The announcement came less than three months after the US President dramatically halted negotiations with the group. "The Taliban wants to make a deal, and we're meeting with them," Trump was quoted by the New York Times as saying with Ghani by his side.

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He, while reiterating his decision to reduce the presence of US troops in Afghanistan to 8,600 from the current 12,000-13,000. added, "We are going to stay until such time as we have a deal, or we have total victory, and they want to make to make a deal very badly."

This was Trump's first impromptu visit to Afghanistan. He arrived in Afghanistan in a darkened jet from Florida after 8:30 pm (local time) and carried out the tradition of feeding turkey and mashed potatoes to the US troops stationed at the Bagram airbase and mingled with them. He also posed for photographs with the servicemen and delivered his remarks in front of several hundred US soldiers at an aircraft hangar, celebrating Washington's military achievements.

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Trump, while talking about his ongoing discussions with the Taliban, said that the Taliban is "now willing" to agree to a ceasefire, something that the Afghan government has been insisting upon and was a sticky point during earlier talks. "We are saying it has to be a ceasefire and they didn't want to do a ceasefire. Now they do want to do a ceasefire. I believe it will probably work out that way," he said of the Taliban.

His comments came soon after the Taliban released an American and Australian professor in exchange for the release of three Taliban prisoners by the Afghan government. In addition to that, the Taliban also released 10 Afghan soldiers earlier this week. The two professors, as part of a prisoner swap deal between the group and the Afghan government under which the latter released three terrorists, including Anas Haqqani, from Bagram prison.

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After the bilateral talks, Ghani joined Trump onstage for his remarks and delivered an almost campaign-style speech. During his speech, he lauded Trump as "the architect" of a strategy for "wiping out Al-Qaeda" in Afghanistan and for the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Apart from cancelling the negotiations, Trump had also scrapped a planned "secret meeting" with the Taliban representatives at Camp David. The US had been negotiating with the Taliban in the last few months at Doha despite the group's reluctance to hold direct talks with the Afghan government, which it views as a US puppet.

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(With ANI inputs)