Aboard The Democracy Train

BEIJING — With President Xi Jinping safely out of the United States and no longer President Trump’s guest, China’s state-run media on Saturday was free to denounce the missile strike on Syria, which the American president told Mr. Xi about while they were finishing dinner.

Xinhua, the state news agency, on Saturday called the strike the act of a weakened politician who needed to flex his muscles. In an analysis, Xinhua also said Mr. Trump had ordered the strike to distance himself from Syria’s backers in Moscow, to overcome accusations that he was “pro-Russia.”

That unflattering assessment reflected China’s official opposition to military interventions in the affairs of other countries. But it was also a criticism of Mr. Trump himself, who Mr. Xi had hoped was a man China could deal with.

Chinese officials had feared that the two leaders’ 24-hour encounter at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida might be marred by a campaign-style anti-China outburst from Mr. Trump. Instead, it was interrupted by the unexpected missile attack.

Some Chinese analysts viewed the strike’s timing as no coincidence. Mr. Trump wants China to do more to deter the development of nuclear weapons by North Korea, its ally, and these analysts viewed the Syria attack as a reminder to Mr. Xi that the United States could also attack the North, if necessary.

The missile strike on Syria overshadowed meetings that American and Chinese officials described as big-picture conversations on trade as well as North Korea, which stopped short of producing specific agreements.

Both sides agreed that the North Korean threat had reached a “very serious” stage, according to Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson. He said the United States was prepared to take its “own course” if China did not do more to rein in the North.

But the official Chinese account of the talks in Xinhua did not mention North Korea — a burning issue for Mr. Trump, but less so for Mr. Xi. Analysts said the omission was probably intentional, a response to the attack on Syria.

Xinhua’s commentary on the Syria strike also made no reference to North Korea. But it mentioned American missile attacks on Libya in 1986 and Sudan in 1998, and scolded the United States for not achieving its “political goals” in those instances.

“It has been a typical tactic of the U.S. to send a strong political message by attacking other countries using advanced warplanes and cruise missiles,” the article said.

The state-run media offered sanitized accounts of the Mar-a-Lago talks, emphasizing the sweeping green lawns on which the leaders walked and the ornate room where the official discussions took place. Those articles omitted the surprise of the Syria attack, in keeping with the goal of presenting an uplifting account of the two leaders meeting as peers.

Mr. Tillerson told reporters that when Mr. Trump notified Mr. Xi about the Syria strike toward the end of dinner, Mr. Xi expressed understanding, because it was punishment for a chemical attack that had killed children.
The Chinese president very rarely talks to the Chinese or foreign news media, making it almost impossible to determine his opinion about the attack or how he expressed it to Mr. Trump.

But Chinese analysts, whose advice is sometimes sought by the government on foreign policy questions, were scornful of the strike, which they viewed as a powerful country attacking a nation unable to fight back. And they rejected what they viewed as an unspoken American message equating Syria, which has no nuclear arsenal, with North Korea, which has carried out five nuclear arms tests and hopes to mount a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental missile.

“I don’t deny that the United States is capable of such an attack against North Korea, but you need to see that North Korea is capable of striking back,” said Lu Chao, director of the Border Studies Institute at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences. “That would create chaos.”

If Syria had nuclear weapons, the United States would not dare attack it, said Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai. “Chemical weapons and nuclear weapons are totally different,” Mr. Shen said. “A chemical bomb kills dozens of people, and the atomic bomb at Hiroshima killed hundreds of thousands.”

Mr. Chen added that many Chinese were “thrilled” by the attack because it would probably result in the United States becoming further mired in the Middle East.

“If the United States gets trapped in Syria, how can Trump make America great again? As a result, China will be able to achieve its peaceful rise,” Mr. Chen said, using a term Beijing employs to characterize its growing power. “Even though we say we oppose the bombing, deep in our hearts we are happy.”

On trade, Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump agreed to a “100-day plan” that Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross said would include “way stations of accomplishment.” American business executives took that to mean there had been no deep negotiations on whether China would further open its markets to American companies.

Business leaders had expected the Chinese to announce investments in the United States that would create jobs, as a way to offset some of Mr. Trump’s complaints about the countries’ trade imbalance. But Mr. Xi made no such offers, at least publicly. According to an account in Xinhua, the Chinese invited the United States to participate in a program it calls One Belt One Road, an ambitious effort to build infrastructure projects across Asia to Europe, for which China hopes it can attract some American investment.

“The Chinese did not want to create the impression that Xi went to the U.S. to make concessions to Trump, that would come across as weakness,” said Yun Sun, a senior associate in the East Asia Program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

In the preparations for the talks, Chinese officials emphasized that they expected few concrete results because they viewed the Florida encounter as a getting-to-know-you session between two big personalities. In that sense, the Chinese prevailed, Ms. Yun said.

“It will be Trump who will have difficulty explaining to his voters what he got from the Chinese,” she said.
Yufan Huang contributed research.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday night that the United States had carried out a missile strike in Syria in response to the Syrian government’s chemical weapons attack this week, which killed more than 80 civilians.
“Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the air base in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched,” Mr. Trump said in remarks at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”

Mr. Trump — who was accompanied by senior advisers, including Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist; Reince Priebus, his chief of staff; his daughter Ivanka Trump; and others — said his decision had been prompted in part by what he called the failures by the world community to respond effectively to the Syrian civil war.

“Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed, and failed very dramatically,” the president said, referring to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. “As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen, and the region continues to destabilize, threatening the United States and its allies.”

Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, told reporters Friday morning that the strike “deals a significant blow to relations between Russia and America, which are already in a poor state,” according to the news agency RIA.

Mr. Peskov said the strike did nothing to combat international terrorism. “On the contrary, this creates a serious obstacle for building of an international coalition to fight it and to effectively resist this universal evil,” he said. Fighting terrorism was Mr. Putin’s stated goal when he dispatched the Russian military to Syria in September 2015, though its main effect has been to shore up Mr. Assad.

Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said Russian forces had been notified in advance of the strike. “Military planners took precautions to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the airfield,” he said. No Russian aircraft were at the base, military officials said.

“We are assessing the results of the strike,” Captain Davis added. “Initial indications are that this strike has severely damaged or destroyed Syrian aircraft and support infrastructure and equipment at Shayrat airfield, reducing the Syrian government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons.”

The cruise missiles struck the airfield beginning around 8:40 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, and the strikes continued for three to four minutes.

According to Captain Davis, the missiles were fired from the destroyers Porter and Ross in the eastern Mediterranean.

Talal Barazi, the governor of Homs Province, where the base sits, told Reuters early Friday that ambulances and fire trucks were scrambling to respond to fires there.

Administration officials described the strikes Mr. Trump ordered as a graphic message to the world that the president was no longer willing to stand idly by as Mr. Assad used horrific weapons in his country’s long civil war. To do otherwise, they said, would be to essentially bless the use of chemical weapons by Mr. Assad and others who might use them.

“This clearly indicates the president is willing to take decisive action when called for,” Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson told reporters in Florida. He said Mr. Trump had concluded after seeing the results of the chemical attack that the United States could no longer “turn away, turn a blind eye.”

“The more we fail to respond to the use of these weapons, the more we begin to normalize their use,” Mr. Tillerson said, a thinly veiled reference to President Barack Obama’s decision to refrain from strikes in 2013.
Mr. Tillerson added that the United States had not informed Mr. Putin about the coming missile strikes and that Mr. Trump had not spoken with the Russian leader in the hours afterward.

The decision to act came with a swiftness that took observers of the new president by surprise. After being briefed on the chemical attack shortly after it occurred, American intelligence agencies and their allies worked quickly to confirm the source of the chemical weapons, administration officials said.

In Washington the next day, the president convened a meeting of senior members of his National Security Council, where military aides presented him with three options. Officials said Mr. Trump peppered them with questions and directed them to focus on two of those options.

On Thursday, after Mr. Trump traveled to Florida for his dinner with President Xi Jinping of China, he convened what officials described as a “decision meeting” with his top national security aides — many of them with him at Mar-a-Lago, and others on secure video screens from Washington.

After what aides called a “meeting of considerable length,” Mr. Trump authorized the missile strikes before starting the dinner with Mr. Xi.

President Trump retaliated against the Assad government for a chemical attack in Syria that killed more than 80 civilians.

“It was important during the president’s deliberations,” said H. R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser, to weigh the risk of action against the “risk of this continued, egregious, inhumane attacks on innocent civilians with chemical weapons.”

A military official said the attack was at the more limited end of the military options presented to Mr. Trump on Thursday by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. The official said the strike was intended to send a signal to Mr. Assad about the United States’ intention to use military force if he continues to use chemical weapons.

It was the first time the White House had ordered military action against forces loyal to Mr. Assad.
Mr. McMaster said the missile strikes would not eliminate Mr. Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons, but would degrade it. He said the United States military had specifically sought to avoid hitting what it believes is a facility containing more sarin gas at the airfield.

He said the military had also sought to “minimize risk” to citizens of other countries — specifically Russians — who might have been in the area at the time.

The Pentagon on Thursday night released a graphic showing the flight track of Syrian aircraft as they left the Shayrat field on Tuesday and carried out the chemical attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province.

WASHINGTON, March 29 — This year, America’s war in Afghanistan will pass a grim milestone as it surpasses the Civil War in duration, as measured against the final withdrawal of Union forces from the South. Only the conflict in Vietnam lasted longer. United States troops have been in Afghanistan since October 2001 as part of a force that peaked at nearly 140,000 troops (of which about 100,000 were American) and is estimated to have cost the taxpayers at least $783 billion.

Despite this heavy expenditure, the United States commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., recently called for a modest troop increase to prevent a deteriorating stalemate. The fall of Sangin in Helmand Province to the Taliban this month is a tactical loss that may be reversed, but it certainly suggests the situation is getting worse. With the Trump administration’s plan to increase the military budget while slashing the diplomatic one, there is a risk that American policy toward Afghanistan will be defined in purely military terms.

Absent from the current debate is a clear statement of our objectives — and a way to end the Afghan war while preserving the investment and the gains we have made, at the cost of some 2,350 American lives. It has always been clear to senior military officers like Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was the American commander in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011, as well as to diplomats like me, that the war could end only through a political settlement, a process through which the Afghan government and the Taliban would reconcile their differences in an agreement also acceptable to the international community.

The challenges of bringing about such a reconciliation are formidable, but the basic outline of a deal is tantalizingly obvious. Despite more than 15 years of warfare, the United States has never had a fundamental quarrel with the Taliban per se; it was the group’s hosting of Al Qaeda that drove our intervention after the Sept. 11 attacks. For its part, the Taliban has never expressed any desire to impose its medieval ideology outside of Afghanistan, and certainly not in the United States.

The core Afghan government requirements for a settlement are that the Taliban ceases violence, breaks with international terrorism and accepts the Afghan Constitution. The Taliban, for its part, insists that all foreign forces withdraw. No doubt, both sides have additional desiderata, but the basic positions do not seem unbridgeable. This is particularly the case now that the Islamic State has emerged in Afghanistan, in conflict with both the government and the Taliban.

Under President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan government has supported reconciliation efforts. And there is no question that ordinary Afghans overwhelmingly support peace, even as most also oppose a return of the Taliban’s brutal regime of the 1990s.

At its heart, the Afghan conflict is between rural traditionalists and urban modernizers, and this has been the case since Afghan Communists seized power in 1978. However, regional powers have also played a predatory role.
Pakistan’s cynical support for the Taliban is merely the most visible of the hedging strategies that various neighbors, including the Iranians and the Russians, have adopted to ensure that they have some armed Afghan faction beholden to their interests. A comprehensive political settlement would remove the security dilemma that drives these counterproductive interventions.

So what is the way forward for an Afghan peace process?

The first step is clear, and has come close to fruition over the years. The Taliban should be allowed to open an office, most likely in Doha, Qatar, to conduct peace talks with the Afghan government. This was very nearly accomplished in 2013, but the Taliban overreached by raising its flag and putting up signs identifying the office as representing the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” The American government and the Afghan government, under President Hamid Karzai, rightly rejected these trappings of an embassy, and the deal collapsed.

All potential partners, including the government of Qatar, have learned the lessons of that debacle and have every incentive to avoid repeating it. This is an area for quiet diplomacy, led by the United States.

Once talks begin, our government will have to define its position. Even after all these years of fighting, the United States sometimes deludes itself into thinking it is not a party to the conflict; the Taliban believes otherwise. In coordination with our Afghan allies, the United States should be prepared to put on the table the conditions under which we would consider pulling our forces out of Afghanistan. Any withdrawal would have to be phased in response to the Taliban’s living up to its commitments, including guarantees that Afghan territory will never be used to enable attacks on America.

The more difficult aspect of the discussion will be among the Afghans themselves as they address the central issues that have divided them for decades. The American position should be to ensure there is no backsliding from the progress Afghanistan has made on human rights, including women’s rights, and constitutional government.

Since there have been no negotiations yet, it is difficult to assess what the Taliban’s actual demands would be. Their concern about the Afghan Constitution may be simply that they were not a party to its drafting. Like other countries’ constitutions, Afghanistan’s can be amended.

The United States must remain committed throughout to strengthening the Afghan state, including support for the Afghan Army, so that the Afghan government delegation has a strong negotiating position. Any final settlement would have to include the terms under which the Taliban enters the political system under the Constitution, specific arrangements to ensure that Afghan territory would not be used to attack others and regional commitments to end proxy warfare on Afghan territory.

I hold no brief for the Taliban — two of my friends were murdered by the group. It is brutal and indiscriminate in its violence, and its position on women’s rights has rightly been condemned by the international community. But these are not good arguments for perpetuating conflict in one of the world’s poorest countries. That would not only be a disservice to the Afghan people, but would also probably be unsupportable among the American people.
We have a president who believes in the art of a deal. We should negotiate a hard bargain with the Taliban.
Richard G. Olson was the United States ambassador to Pakistan from 2012 to 2015 and the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2015 to 2016.