Tuesday, October 19, 2021
After a chaotic troop withdrawal
US special envoy for Afghanistan resigns
After the chaotic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, the US special envoy for the country, Zalmay Khalilzad, resigns from his post. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has already named a successor. Khalilzad is the architect of a much-criticized Trump deal with the Taliban.
The US special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, who came under fire after the radical Islamic Taliban came to power, resigns. The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced. Blinken thanked the diplomacy veteran for his “decades of service” for the USA and appointed Khalilzad’s previous deputy, Thomas West, as the new special envoy to Afghanistan.
The now 70-year-old Khalilzad was appointed “Special Envoy for Afghanistan’s Reconciliation” in 2018 by then US President Donald Trump. The US diplomat, born in the Afghan Mazar-i-Sharif, was supposed to find a peace solution for Afghanistan in order to enable a US troop withdrawal from the civil war country.
He is the architect of the Doha Agreement, which was sealed in February 2020, in which the United States promised the Taliban a full withdrawal of troops by May 2021. In return, the Taliban refrained from attacking US troops and their allies, promised a break with the al-Qaeda terror network and promised future peace talks with the Afghan government.
“He negotiated badly”
However, the Taliban overran the country in the wake of Trump’s successor Joe Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. The Islamists returned to power last August with the capture of the capital, Kabul. For the United States and its Western allies, 20 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the withdrawal from the Hindu Kush became a humiliation.
Khalilzad came under massive attack, politicians and experts gave him a miserable testimony. “He negotiated poorly, encouraged the Taliban and claimed that negotiations would lead to a power-sharing agreement when the Taliban had no intention of sharing power,” said Husain Haqqani of the Hudson Institute think tank in August.
The conservative US MP and Afghanistan veteran Michael Waltz also wrote in a letter to Biden in August that the special envoy had “badly advised the president” and that his diplomatic strategy had “failed spectacularly”.