KABUL: Afghanistan’s president has postponed a planned visit to Washington early next week where he was to discuss the US-Taliban talks on ending America’s longest war, a person familiar with the negotiations said Friday.
The development emerged after the U.S. envoy negotiating with the Taliban, Zalmay Khalilzad, abruptly returned to Qatar for unexpected talks with the insurgents on the deal that he had described as complete just days ago. The Taliban maintain a political office in the Gulf Arab state.
The agreement “in principle” to begin a US troop withdrawal only needed President Donald Trump’s approval, Khalilzad had announced on Monday.
The person who told The Associated Press of President Ashraf Ghani’s postponed Washington trip was not authorised to talk to reporters and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Since Khalilzad’s announcement on Monday, two horrific Taliban car bombings in the Afghan capital, Kabul — one of which killed a US service member — and objections to the deal from the Afghan government and several former U.S. ambassadors to Afghanistan have put pressure on Khalilzad as many wonder whether a deal will truly bring peace.
The Taliban have explained their surge in deadly attacks — including on the capitals of northern Kunduz and Baghlan provinces last weekend — as necessary to give them a stronger negotiating position in talks with the U.S., a stance that has appalled Afghans and others as scores of civilians are killed.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel has even demanded that Khalilzad testify before the House committee about the negotiations, saying that “I do not consider your testimony at this hearing optional.”
The Afghan president has been shut out of the U.S.-Taliban negotiations, and during Khalilzad’s visit to Kabul this week Ghani was shown the agreement but not allowed to keep it. The Taliban have rejected negotiations with the Afghan government, seeing it as a puppet of the U.S., though it has expressed willingness to meet with Afghan officials in their personal capacity.
Ghani’s government this week raised objections to the deal, echoing the former U.S. ambassadors’ concerns that a full U.S. troop withdrawal that moves too quickly and without requiring the Taliban to meet certain conditions, such as reducing violence, could lead to “total civil war” such as the one that engulfed the country in the 1990s after a rapid Soviet pullout and before the Taliban swept into power.
“Afghans have been bitten by this snake before,” presidential adviser Waheed Omer said Thursday, recalling past agreements from which the Afghan government has been sidelined.
The U.S. hopes its deal with the Taliban will bring the militant group to the table for intra-Afghan talks to begin ahead of Afghanistan’s presidential election on Sept. 28 — a vote that Ghani insisted must be held on time and not be swept aside by any kind of interim government.
Few details have emerged from the nine rounds of U.S.-Taliban talks over nearly a year. Khalilzad has said the first 5,000 U.S. troops would withdraw from five bases in Afghanistan within 135 days of a final deal. Between 14,000 and 13,000 troops are currently in the country.
However, the Taliban want all of the approximately 20,000 U.S. and NATO troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible.
The US for its part seeks Taliban guarantees that they will not allow Afghanistan to become a haven from which extremist groups such as al-Qaida and the local affiliate of the Islamic State group can launch global attacks.
On Friday the Taliban attacked a third provincial capital in Afghanistan in less than a week, killing at least two civilians, an official said.
Farah provincial governor Mohammad Shoaib Sabet said another 15 people were wounded, citing local hospitals, and said airstrikes had been carried out against the militant group. Small clashes continued in the city, he said.
One Farah resident, Shams Noorzai, said the Taliban seized an army recruitment center and set it on fire. All shops had closed, he said, and some people were trying to flee. The governor later said security forces had re-taken the recruitment center.
Also on Friday, fighting resumed in at least one part of Kunduz city and two outlying districts, with some residents trying to flee again, provincial council head Mohammad Yousuf Ayubi said.
