US made u-turn in fundamental position toward Afghanistan: Report

KABUL (TOLO News): The Peace Research Institute Oslo said that the US had made a U-turn in its fundamental position regarding Afghanistan, from seeing the preservation of the democratic state and the political order that it had stood behind since 2001 as an absolute, to prioritizing its own “military disengagement.”

The report said the images of the Islamic Emirate’s seizure of Kabul and the dramatic evacuations of internationals and Afghan citizens in August 2021 are emblematic of a failed peace process, but the real turning point came three years prior, when the US decided that military withdrawal from Afghanistan, rather than sustaining a fragile Afghan government fighting the Taliban, was its prime objective.

The report noted that the US entered direct talks with the Islamic Emirate, and excluded the republic government’s authorities, which were highly “dependent on international support for their survival.”

“In the process, the US gave in to the Taliban’s demands, with the resultant peace treaty non-committal with regards to a ceasefire, and with built-in vagueness on mutual obligations, mechanisms for monitoring, and consequences of violations,” the report said.

The report also said that the US made commitments on behalf of an unwilling Afghan government, most importantly to a large-scale exchange of prisoners.

“In effect, the US-Taliban agreement paved the way for the Taliban’s takeover, an outcome that was not given yet seemed highly likely, whether seen from the vantage point of 2018 (when talks started) or 2020 (when they were concluded),” the report reads. “Here lies the core of the US ethical conundrum.”

“However, there is a difference between the right of the US to decide to withdraw and to negotiate the terms for withdrawal, and the US undermining the Afghan republican government negotiation of the key terms for a possible intra-Afghan peace and making commitments on behalf of the Afghan government.”