Mon 01 March 2021:
The Taliban movement yesterday called on the United States to adhere to the peace agreement which was signed last year in the Qatari capital Doha, warning that any attempt to alter its terms would lead to the “failure of peace”.
“The Doha agreement has created a practical framework for bringing peace and security to Afghanistan. If any other pathway is pursued as a replacement, then it is already doomed to failure,” the movement said in a statement in commemoration of the deal’s first anniversary.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is currently reviewing the deal his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, sealed with the Afghan insurgency and deciding whether to pull the remaining 2,500 American soldiers from Afghanistan to close America’s longest war. NATO-led U.S. allies have fewer than 10,000 troops left in the country.
Under the deal, Taliban agreed to stop attacking international forces in Afghanistan and to open direct peace talks with representatives of the U.S.-backed Afghan government to try to negotiate a political settlement to the country’s long conflict.
Washington acknowledges the U.S. military has not suffered any casualties since signing the Doha agreement. Before then, the Afghan military mission had claimed the lives of more than 2,400 American soldiers and injured thousands of others.
It stressed on its adherence to what the group described as a “historic deal”, calling on Washington “to honour its part to maintain peace.”
The group also renewed its demands for the release of its remaining prisoners as well as its removal from the United Nations blacklist, adding that the latter would “speed up direct peace negotiations between the Afghans.”
On 29 February 2020, Qatar mediated a deal between the US and the Taliban. Under its terms, Washington agreed to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan in 14 months in return for a prisoner swap between the two rivals.
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