Has Biden been handcuffed by Trump’s Doha Taliban deal? – News FOX23

WASHINGTON – (AP) – After President Donald Trump signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, he optimistically proclaimed that “we think we will be successful in the end.” Its Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said the administration “seized the best opportunity for peace in a generation.”

Eighteen months later, President Joe Biden points the finger at the deal signed in Doha, Qatar, as he tries to deflect responsibility from the Taliban invading Afghanistan in a blitz. He says it forced him to withdraw US troops, setting the stage for the chaos engulfing the country.

But Biden can only go so far by claiming the deal locked him up. It contained an escape clause: the United States could have withdrawn from the agreement if the Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay there, although he delayed the full withdrawal from May until September.

Chris Miller, acting Defense Secretary in the last few months of the Trump administration, was angered that Biden was handcuffed by the deal.

“If he thought the deal was bad, he could have renegotiated. He had plenty of opportunities to do it if he wanted to, ”Miller, a senior Pentagon counterterrorism official at the time of signing the Doha deal, said in an interview.

But renegotiating would have been difficult. Biden would have had little influence. Like Trump, he wanted American troops to leave Afghanistan. Withdrawing from the deal might have forced him to fire thousands more.

He made the point on Monday, saying in a televised White House address that he would not commit to sending more US troops to fight for the future of Afghanistan while returning to the Trump deal for suggest that the withdrawal route was predetermined by its predecessor.

“The choice I had to make, as president, was either to follow through on this deal or to be ready to start fighting the Taliban again in the middle of the spring fighting season,” Biden said.

The Taliban takeover, far faster than officials in either administration had envisioned, prompted questions, even from some Trump-era officials, over whether whether the terms and conditions of the deal – and the decisions that followed – were enough to protect Afghanistan once the US military pulled out.

The landmark deal has always been high caliber diplomacy, requiring some degree of trust in the Taliban as a potential peace partner and signed despite the skepticism of war-weary Afghans who feared losing their authority in any deal. power sharing.

“The Doha deal was a very weak deal and the United States should have obtained more concessions from the Taliban,” said Lisa Curtis, an Afghan expert who served during the Trump administration as senior director of the Council of national security for South and Central Asia.

She called it “wishful thinking” to believe that the Taliban might be interested in lasting peace. The resulting deal, she said, was heavily Taliban-oriented, helped undermine Afghan President Ashraf Ghani – he fled the country on Sunday – and facilitated the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners without proportional concession from the Taliban.

“They wanted the American forces to leave, and they wanted to take control of the country militarily, and they thought they could do it,” Curtis said of the Taliban. “It was just crystal clear.”

The agreement called for the United States to reduce its strength to 8,600 from 13,000 over the next three to four months, with the remaining US forces withdrawing in 14 months, or before May 1.

It stipulated commitments the Taliban had to make to prevent terrorism, including specific obligations to renounce al-Qaida and prevent this group or others from using Afghan soil to prepare attacks on the United States. or their allies. While the deal obliges the Taliban to stop all attacks on US and coalition forces, it especially does not explicitly oblige them to expel al-Qaida or to stop attacks on the Afghan army or offensives to take control. control of Afghan towns or other populated areas.

The deal gave significant legitimacy to the Taliban, whose leaders met with Pompeo, the first secretary of state to meet with the group’s leaders. There was also talk of their coming to the United States to meet with Trump.

Nonetheless, Trump spoke cautiously about the prospects for the deal’s success and cautioned against military firepower if “bad things happen.” Pompeo also said the United States was “realistic” and “restrained,” determined to avoid endless wars.

US officials made it clear at the time that the deal was subject to conditions and that the failure of intra-Afghan peace talks to reach a negotiated settlement would have nullified the withdrawal requirement.

A day before the Doha deal, a senior official for US chief negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad said the deal was not irreversible and that “there is no obligation for the United States to withdraw its troops. if the Afghan parties cannot reach an agreement or if the Taliban show bad faith during this negotiation.

These negotiations were due to begin less than a month after the signing of the agreement between the United States and the Taliban, but were delayed due to disputes between the Taliban and the Afghan government over the release of the prisoners. Amid numerous upheavals, negotiations had come to nothing by the time Biden announced his step down decision in April. They haven’t done it since either.

Miller said it was the “right approach” and necessary to force Ghani to negotiate. He said the Doha deal was still supposed to be “phase one” of the process, with the next side being the United States using its influence to have Ghani negotiate a power-sharing deal with the Taliban.

“Obviously he wasn’t excited about this, but he was going to do it – or he was going to be taken out,” Miller said. “We were going to put serious pressure on him to make a deal with the Taliban.”

Looking back, however, said Curtis, the United States should not have entered the Doha talks “unless we were prepared to represent the interests of the Afghan government.” It was an unfair negotiation because no one was defending the interests of the Afghan government.

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