After Nato’s September withdrawal deadline, any foreign troops, including the U.S, left in Afghanistan will be at risk as occupiers, the Taliban has told the BBC.
According to media reports, around 1,000 U.S troops could remain in Afghanistan to protect diplomats and Kabul’s international airport. Nato’s 20-year military mission in Afghanistan has all but ended.
The U.S.A. has spent trillions of dollars to counter the Taliban’s terrorism in Afghanistan and fight extremists. 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack is set a new withdrawal date of U.S.’s troops from Afghanisthan by Mr Biden. Officials said the troop withdrawal would likely be completed well before the September 11 target date.
The earlier date setup for troop’s withdrawal was May 1 2021; however, according to media reports, Biden’s administration said that removing coalition troops by that date would be difficult given continued high levels of violence by the Taliban.
The U.S. is sending the country’s longest overseas war, per their February 2020 agreement which the Trump administration did with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that while Taliban attacks on Afghan forces are increasing, there is no rise in attacks on American troops. If we hadn’t withdrawn our troops, violence would have increased against us as well. So the status quo was not an option.
As per the Doha agreements, the Taliban were also supposed to start peace talks with the Afghan government. However, violence from the Taliban’s side has increased more than U.S. troops have begun leaving Afghanistan.
Officials in Kabul said that these negotiations had led Afghanistan nowhere, and they don’t expect any progress until the fighting season ends.
Under a deal with the Afghan militant group, the U.S. and its Nato allies agreed to withdraw all troops and received a commitment by the Taliban not to allow al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group to operate in the areas they control. However, the Taliban has started occupying more territories from Afghanistan’s troops.
Experts have raised concerns over the future of Kabul in the hand of the Taliban.
Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said seizing Kabul’s troops was not the Taliban’s policy. We are against the foreign military forces and not against diplomats, NGOs and workers and NGOs functioning and embassies functioning for our people. We will not threaten them.
LAST WEEK, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the Afghanistan government could collapse as soon as six months after the American military withdraws its troops from Afghanistan.
The American military has already withdrawn more than half of its 3,500 troops and its equipment.
Taliban has already started battling with Afghan government troops inside the northern city of Kunduz. According to some media reports, they have occupied the main border crossing with Tajikistan and reached the outskirts of north Afghanistan’s central hub Mazar-e-Sharif. Tajikistan’s border service said that 134 Afghan troops at the intersection were granted refuge while other 100 were killed or captured by the Taliban.
U.S. intelligence experts believe that President Ashraf Ghani’s government met President Biden in Washington recently and got assurance of American support for Afghanistan for two more years once the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is completed.
