WASHINGTON -  President Donald Trump told visiting members of the UN Security Council on Monday the US would no longer talk with the Taliban following a recent string of deadly attacks in Afghanistan.

Trump railed against a series of “atrocities” in Afghanistan and said as a result the US would not engage in any future talks with the Taliban as the administration seeks to end a stalemate in America’s longest war.

“Innocent people are being killed left and right. Bombing, in the middle of children, in the middle of families, bombing, killing all over Afghanistan,” Trump said. “So we don’t want to talk with the Taliban. There may be a time but it’s going to be a long time.”

Trump’s remarks at the diplomatic luncheon marked a shift in tone on Afghanistan. The US has said previously that any peace talks with the Taliban need to be part of an Afghan-led process, but the US has never precluded talking to the Taliban.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who sat next to the president at the luncheon, has said previously that after an effective military effort, a political settlement including some Taliban might be possible, echoing language from former President Barack Obama’s administration. Tillerson had said the US would support peace talks with the Taliban “without preconditions.”

The lunch was attended by representatives from the 15-member UN Security Council, including ambassadors to the US from China, France, Russia and Britain. The discussions were expected to also focus on international hotspots such as Iran, North Korea and terrorism.

In January, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who helped organise Monday’s luncheon, said the US policy on Afghanistan was working and the parties were “closer to talks with the Taliban and the peace process than we’ve seen before.”

Several attempts to hold peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban have failed. In 2013, hopes were raised when the Taliban opened an office in Qatar aimed at facilitating those talks, but a controversy over the Talban’s move to hoist the flag it used in Afghanistan during its five-year rule ultimately derailed the talks. Since then, efforts to lure the Taliban into talks have yielded little progress.

Trump has sought to change the course of the long-running conflict, sending thousands more US troops to Afghanistan and moving away from a “time-based” approach to one that more explicitly links US assistance to concrete results from the Afghan government.

PAK CONCERNS ABOUT AFGHANISTAN LEGITIMATE: CIA EX-CHIEF

Former head of Coalition forces in Afghanistan and former CIA Director General ® David Petraeus has said that Pakistan has legitimate concerns about some of their enemies having safe havens in eastern Afghanistan.

General Petraeus, who recently visited India, in an interview with Indian Express said the anti-Pakistani Taliban are in very rugged parts which Afghan security forces can’t control.

However he said there needs to be a coordinated effort and a seriousness of reeling in these groups on Pakistani soil, rather than tolerate, on in some cases, may be as is alleged supporting them in some fashion. Asked to comment on President Trump’s tweet on Pakistan, Petraeus said it represented an accumulation of frustration, and probably not just with his administration but building on the accumulation of previous administrations where many of us were trying very hard to, frankly, to help our Pakistani partners, as they were combating the TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan), dealing with some of the other extremists inside their country that many of us believe represent the most significant existential threat to Pakistan.

He said there has not been the kind of action we had all hoped to be taken to reduce, to eliminate the sanctuaries from which the forces that are causing such problems in Afghanistan are being organised, led, commanded and also provisioned and taken care of from time to time.