Honey the Hamster

Austin said that by urging the U.S. to end airstrikes against the Taliban, the Doha deal meant the Islamist group “has strengthened, they have intensified their offensive operations against Afghan security forces, and Afghans have lost a lot of people every week.” Although the Taliban derive their main wish from this agreement – the withdrawal of US troops – they have remained vague in their commitments to protect civil rights, which they brutally repressed when they were in power. The deal also depends on more difficult negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government over the country`s future. Officials hope that these talks will lead to a power-sharing agreement and a permanent ceasefire, but both ideas have been anathema to the Taliban in the past. “The Doha agreement was a very weak agreement, and the United States. should have received more concessions from the Taliban,” said Lisa Curtis, an Afghanistan expert who served as the National Security Council`s executive director for South and Central Asia under the Trump administration. Former acting defense secretary Christopher Miller told Defense One this week that Trump`s deal was actually a “game” to obscure his administration`s true intentions, which were to mediate a Taliban-led government that would allow a small number of U.S. troops to stay in the country to conduct counterterrorism missions. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who resigned from the Trump administration before the deal was finalized, tweeted Wednesday: “Negotiating with the Taliban is like negotiating with the devil.” “The Islamic Emirate considers this to be a clear violation of the Doha Agreement, which is not in the interest of either the United States or Afghanistan,” the statement reads, referring to the agreement signed in the Qatari capital. On February 29, 2020, in Doha, Qatar, the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban in which the United States promised to completely withdraw its troops by May 2021, with the Taliban pledging on several terms, including stopping attacks on U.S.

and coalition forces. The stated goal was to promote peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government in Kabul, but these diplomatic efforts never gained popularity until Biden took office in January. Eighteen months later, President Joe Biden is referring to the deal signed in Doha, Qatar, as he tries to deflect blame for the Taliban who invaded Afghanistan in a flash. He says this has forced him to withdraw U.S. troops and prepare the ground for the chaos engulfing the country. U.S. officials made it clear at the time that the agreement was based on conditions and that the failure of intra-Afghan peace talks to reach a negotiated solution would have lifted the obligation to withdraw. Retaliation against al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies was the catalyst that led to the US invasion. But it was an emerging sense of futility that was perhaps best demonstrated by the United States` acceptance of relatively small concessions by the Taliban in the deal that led successive governments to find a way out. The agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, which follows more than a year of negotiations and ostensibly excluded the US-backed Afghan government, is not a final peace agreement, is full of ambiguities and could still be dissolved.

The agreement sets a timetable for the final withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, the impoverished Central Asian country once unknown to many Americans and now symbolises endless conflicts, foreign entanglements and an incubator of terrorist conspiracies. Lisa Curtis, a former senior National Security Council official who sat next to Afghan envoy Zalmay Khalilzad during negotiations with the Taliban, told AP: “The Doha agreement was a very weak agreement, and the United States should have received more concessions from the Taliban.” The agreement called for the U.S. to reduce its forces from 13,000 to 8,600 within three to four months, with the remaining U.S. forces withdrawing in 14 months or by May 1. The collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces dates back to a 2020 deal between the Taliban and the Trump administration that promised a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops, senior Pentagon officials told Congress. The deal gave significant legitimacy to the Taliban, whose leaders met with Pompeo, the first secretary of state to have such interactions. There have also been discussions about their coming to the United States to meet with Trump.

“We are committed to the agreement signed in Doha between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the United States. We also want the Americans and their allies to defend the agreement. Instead of making negative comments, it would be better for them to choose the path of diplomacy and cooperation,” he said. After the Doha deal, he said the troop reduction ordered by President Biden in April was “the other nail in the coffin.” Why it matters: The deal was reviewed to lay the groundwork for the U.S. military`s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which coincided with a large-scale Taliban offensive that ended Sunday with the fall of Kabul. The historic agreement has always been high-level diplomacy that required some degree of trust in the Taliban as a potential peacemaker and was signed despite skepticism from war-weary Afghans who feared losing their authority in a power-sharing agreement. The other side: Pompeo, the only American. The foreign minister, who personally met with Taliban officials at the signing ceremony of the agreement in Doha in September 2020, told Fox News that he did not believe the negotiations legitimized the Taliban and that the Trump administration had never trusted the group. Senior Pentagon officials said Wednesday that the collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces in August could be attributed to the 2020 agreement signed by the United States with the Taliban in Doha, which promised a complete withdrawal of troops.

Joe Biden experienced the biggest crisis of his presidency over the withdrawal in Afghanistan and drew criticism from US Republican lawmakers. McKenzie believed “for some time” that if the U.S. reduced the number of its military advisers in Afghanistan below 2,500, the Kabul government would inevitably collapse “and the military would follow.” In addition to the sanctimonious effects of the Doha deal, the troop reduction ordered by Biden in April is “the other nail in the coffin” for the 20-year war effort, he added, because it blinds the U.S. military to conditions within the Afghan army: “Our advisers were no longer there with these units.” A day before the Doha agreement, he was one of the American leader`s top advisers.