Zalmay Khalilzad, the stager US envoy whose months of hostel- chamber tactfulness helped end the US war in Afghanistan but failed at precluding a Taliban preemption, abnegated on Monday.
In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Khalilzad defended his record but conceded that he came up short and said he wanted to make way during the” new phase of our Afghanistan policy.”
“The political arrangement between the Afghan government and the Taliban didn’t go forward as imaged,”he wrote.
“The reasons for this are too complex and I’ll partake my studies in the coming day and weeks.”
Born in Afghanistan, the dapper 70- time-old academic turned US diplomat took elderly positions under former President GeorgeW. Bush, getting the US minister to Kabul and also Baghdad and the United Nations.
As former chairman Donald Trump itched to end America’s longest war in Afghanistan, he brought back Khalilzad, who led total addresses with the Taliban– without including the US- backed government in Kabul.
Those addresses led to a February 2020 agreement in which US colors would leave the ensuing time.
But peace accommodations between the Taliban and the leadership in Kabul failed to gain traction, and the government that the United States erected over 20 times atrophied within days as US colors left.
Rare US figure
Steeped in Afghanistan’s language and customs, Khalilzad was a rare US diplomat suitable to develop a cordial fellowship with Taliban leaders whose governance was stumbled by the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks over its hello to Al-Qaeda.
Khalilzad, despite his Democratic cooperation, was kept in place when Popular President Joe Biden defeated Trump and decided to go ahead with the pullout.
Khalilzad soon came a lightning rod for review, with indeed his elders in the Biden administration– while venting respect for him tête-à-tête– condemning the tactfulness behind the 2020 agreement.
Blinken said that Khalilzad’s deputy, Thomas West, would take over as the special envoy.
West is a expert assistant to President Joe Biden, serving on his staff when he was vice chairman. West has worked for times on South Asia policy including on the US-India mercenary nuclear deal.
hortly before Khalilzad’s abdication came public, the State Department said the United States would not be suitable to attend a new session called Tuesday by Russia that also includes China and Pakistan, historically the Taliban’s primary backer.
‘ Time not on our side’
After Trump ended US opposition to speaking to the Taliban, Khalilzad finagled the release from a Pakistani jail of the group’sco-founder Mullah Baradar, seen as a figure who could deliver on pledges, and spent months with the largely pastoral revolutionists in a luxury hostel in the Qatari capital Doha.
But filmland of him smiling with the Taliban earned him heated review in Kabul where some in the now- fallen government as well as recently Western- acquainted elite berated him and indicted him of dealing out Afghanistan.
In interviews last month, Khalilzad said that he’d reached a deal with the Taliban in which the mutineers would stay out of Kabul and negotiate a political transition.
But Khalilzad said the deal collapsed when President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on August 15 and the Taliban saw a security vacuum.
Speaking to Foreign Policy, Khalilzad said that the Taliban fulfilled crucial corridor of the February 2020 agreement including not attacking the departing US colors.
“I admire those who say we should not have negotiated with the Talibs without the government being there. But we do not know how much further fighting would have taken for the Talibs to agree to that,”he said.
But with no appetite in the United States for another swell of colors in its longest war,”each time we were losing ground to the Talibs,”he said.
“Time wasn’t on our side.”
Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani minister to Washington who’s now a elderly fellow at the Hudson Institute, said that Khalilzad failed in that he” equated US pullout with peace.”
