(Washington) The United States did not put enough pressure on former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to agree to share power with the Taliban, lamented the US envoy for Afghanistan who has just resigned , in an interview broadcast Sunday on CBS.
Speaking for the first time since his resignation announced on October 18, Zalmay Khalilzad strongly defended the agreement to withdraw American forces that he had negotiated with the Taliban under the presidency of Donald Trump. And expressed some indirect reservations about its implementation by current President Joe Biden.
“The agreement was a conditional package” which provided in particular for “negotiations” between the insurgents and the government in Kabul as well as a “permanent global ceasefire”, explained the diplomat.
But once he arrived at the White House, President Biden made the “decision to implement the withdrawal on the basis of a timetable”, regardless of these conditions, he noted.
“It is a decision taken far above me”, he added, regretting that “some” in Washington make him a scapegoat for the chaotic departure from Afghanistan and the seizure of power by the Islamists .
“We always inherit agreements”, “either you agree to implement them, or you say” no, I want to renegotiate “,” he continued.
The Democratic government believes that, having inherited the deal negotiated by the Trump team, it had no choice but to leave Afghanistan, as the inter-Afghan peace negotiations were deadlocked and the Taliban would have resumed. their attacks on American forces if they had stayed.
Zalmay Khalilzad acknowledges this situation, and admits that things did not go the way he wanted.
But the diplomat seems to blame most of the blame on the Afghan government of former President Ashraf Ghani, which he said never agreed to share power even though the Taliban were in a position of military strength.
“They preferred the status quo to a political settlement,” he explained.
“We have been nice to President Ghani. We have been diplomats. We encouraged him, ”but“ I think we didn’t put enough pressure on him, ”he added.
According to him, under the initial conditional withdrawal agreement, the Taliban would have ended up agreeing to a sharing of power, but Ashraf Ghani clung to his post, blocking any solution. He regrets that Washington did not clearly threaten to cease its military support in order to make him bow.
Zalmay Khalilzad also reaffirmed that the flight of the Afghan president on August 15 precipitated the total victory of the Taliban and derailed an agreement, negotiated by the United States, for a smoother transition and a form of power sharing.
“It has strengthened the most radical Taliban,” very influential in the new Afghan government, he said. He added that a more orderly outcome, in accordance with the initial plan, would have instead “strengthened the more moderate, those who were involved in the negotiations.”