WASHINGTON – President Biden ignored the counsel of senior US diplomats – including Secretary of State Antony Blinken – who urged him not to pull US troops out of Afghanistan without certain conditions in place, former Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in a transcribed interview released Wednesday.
While the withdrawal was set in motion by former President Donald Trump as part of the 2020 Doha Agreement involving the US and Afghan governments and the Taliban, Khalilzad — who helped negotiate that deal — testified that Biden could have stopped or altered the plan to remove all US forces from Afghanistan by September 2021.
“The State Department — or the secretary and myself, we wanted a conditional withdrawal approach,” he said. “But the ultimate decision was, as we all know, that it was to withdraw based on a timetable.”
Biden could have demanded that the Taliban and Afghanistan government reach a separate peace agreement before US troops left the country, which Khalilzad said was his recommendation.
“Secretary Blinken and I, I believe, did recommend that conditionality. That’s my judgment, that conditionality would be the prudent thing to do,” Kalilzad told the committee in his Nov. 8 interview. “But then the response was, ‘Can you get the other side – the Talibs – not to go back to fighting?”
Such an agreement could have been based on an early 2021 peace negotiation that Khalilzad said visualized a “peace government,” which would have given the Taliban an equal share of power over Kabul with the Western-backed Afghan government.
“It was essentially kind of a power-sharing formula that our experts had put together in consultation with outside experts in which the government consists of individuals with ties to both – from the Afghan Government and the Taliban – and be led by somebody acceptable to both sides,” he told the committee.
But when reaching such a conditional agreement appeared unlikely, Biden instead decided to move forward with the pullout to avoid Taliban attacks on US forces.
The sudden lack of US support helped enable the Taliban to overrun Afghan forces before taking Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, 15 days before the last American service member left the capital.
Despite the fiasco, Khalilzad told lawmakers that State Department officials had predicted the power-sharing initiative would not have lasted longer than three years without a continued US presence in the country.
However, any agreement may have prevented the Taliban from taking complete control of Afghanistan before US forces departed, allowing for a less panicked and rushed evacuation process.
Khalilzad’s transcript represented the committee’s fifth tranche of documents released this year that related to its investigations into the bugout.
