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The scenario of the dizzying takeover of power by the Taliban in Afghanistan was drawn up long before the capture of Kabul on Sunday.
On February 29, 2020, the United States government, chaired by Donald trump, and the Taliban signed in Doha, Qatar, the agreement that set a timetable for the final withdrawal of the United States and its allies after nearly 20 years of conflict.
In return, the Taliban pledge was signed not to allow Afghan territory to be used for planning or carrying out actions threatening the security of the United States.
It was officially called the Accord to bring peace to Afghanistan, although for the moment its only observable result is the fall of the Afghan government, with the departure of the president. Achraf Ghani the country and the fear that the Taliban could reestablish the fundamentalist regime they imposed on Afghanistan before the Western invasion.
Many experts believe that the return of the Taliban is a consequence of the Doha agreement. “It wasn’t a peace deal, it was a surrender,” he told BBC Mundo. Husain Haqqani, Director for Central and South Asia at the Hudson Institute and former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States.
What was agreed in Doha
The agreement set a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from the United States and its international allies within 14 months of the announcement of the agreement.
Washington also promised to lift the sanctions it had imposed on Taliban leaders.
In return, Washington obtained a pledge that the Taliban would not allow “any of its members, or any other individual or group, including al-Qaeda, to use Afghan territory to threaten the security of the United States and its nations. allies ”.
Likewise, it was established that the Taliban and the Afghan government would then start the so-called negotiations between Afghans, which should lead to a ceasefire and a final agreement on the political future of the country.
The Taliban included at the end of the negotiations the demand for an agreement to release the prisoners, which was eventually included. Up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners and 1,000 Afghan government officials held by the Taliban would be released.
What went wrong with the Doha deal
For Laurel Miller, retired American diplomat and director of the Asia program at the International Crisis Group, a think tank, “nothing that is happening is surprising.”
Haqqani, for his part, assures us that “the only thing the Taliban agreed to was an American withdrawal”.
“They said, ‘Okay, we’re going to start a dialogue with the Afghan government.’ But they never took it seriously.”
The point is that the Afghan government fell before dialogue with the Taliban resulted in the planned ceasefire and a final agreement. And even the violence escalated in the months following the deal, some observers say, due to the Taliban’s interest in controlling as much territory as possible and strengthening itself in the face of these inconclusive negotiations.
The Doha Agreement was based on the premise, taken up by the government of Joe biden and its predecessor, Donald trump, that it would be the Afghan security forces who would take control of the situation after the Western withdrawal.
But Afghan capitals have fallen to the Taliban in recent days with little resistance from state forces, in whose training and equipment the United States has invested millions of dollars in recent years.
According to anonymous military sources cited by the Washington Post, many Afghan military and police commanders agreed to surrender to the Taliban in exchange for money, once the Doha deal made it clear that the withdrawal of US forces was imminent. .
One of the big concerns today is what will happen to the Afghans, as there are fears that they will once again face the discrimination and gender-based violence that was key to the Taliban regime of the 1990s.
The Doha agreement does not mention anything about them and does not oblige the Taliban to respect human rights.
Taliban spokesman Suhail Saheen told the BBC that in the new Afghanistan “women can have access to education and work”.
Analyst Haqqani warns, however, that one can never trust “the word of the Taliban: they always take their promises to courts which are governed by their interpretation of Islam.”
Haqqani believes that “it is only a matter of time before the threat of terrorist actions from Afghanistan feared by Western countries materializes” and regrets that the Doha agreement does not include any mechanism ensuring that, indeed, the Taliban respect their commitment not to authorize so that Afghanistan becomes a terrorist base.
He is among those who fear that among the 5,000 prisoners released under the Doha agreement are members of jihadist organizations such as Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State or the Islamic Movement in East Turkestan, which targets the Chinese region of Xinjiang where the Uyghurs are located. live, a minority of Chinese Muslims.
How the Doha deal was concluded
The invasion of Afghanistan was part of the “war on terror” declared by former US President George W. Bush after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The Taliban’s Afghanistan was one of Al-Qaeda and US intelligence bases there and in neighboring Pakistan the main headquarters of its leader’s operations, Osama Bin Laden.
His actions against American and Western interests were later joined by those of the self-proclaimed Islamic state.
When Trump arrived at the White House in 2017, he did so by promising to end America’s “never-ending wars”.
In 2018, talks began with the Taliban to end a conflict in which more than 2,400 US servicemen and more than 32,000 Afghan civilians have died.
Trump tasked US special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khaliljad to negotiate a deal with the Taliban in Doha, where much of the Taliban leadership, led by By Abdul Ghani Baradar.
Negotiations were halted several times and Trump came to regard the deal as “dead,” but eventually Washington ended up accepting the Taliban’s demand that the Afghan government withdraw from the negotiations and unblock the dialogue.
When he announced the deal, Trump warned: “If things go wrong, we will come back with a force like never before. “
His successor in the White House, Biden, decided to accelerate the withdrawal and, despite the images of the last few hours, reaffirmed his decision to end “America’s longest war”.
For newspaper archives, there will be words like that of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg after the announcement of the Doha deal: “We will only leave when the conditions are right.”
Also those of the Afghan activist Zahra Husseini, who told AFP: “Looking at his signature, I had this bad feeling that it would lead to the return of the Taliban to power and not to peace”.
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