Donald Trump was “very determined” on the withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan, “whether it happened as part of an agreement or it happened without an agreement” – a former US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation told the US House Foreign Affairs Committee in a closed-door interview on November 8, 2023, details of which have been released after six months.
In his interview, Zalmay Khalilzad also said he believed the Trump administration’s rhetoric led the Taliban to conclude that the US military would withdraw from Afghanistan regardless of the outcome of US-Taliban negotiations.
What seems apparent from the interview is that the Taliban had already assessed during negotiations with the US on the Doha withdrawal deal that the US would exit Afghanistan regardless of those negotiations.
Other closed-door interviews reveal that some on the ground executing this policy believed that besides the rhetoric, subsequent decisions weakened the American and the Afghan government position further.
Ambassador Ross Wilson, who was the Charge d’Affaires in Kabul in 2020-2021, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that it was morally challenging and a “very, very difficult” process to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners in Afghan custody per the Doha Deal. He said, it “contributed to morale issues and disillusionment in the Afghan security forces and the kind of broader law enforcement apparatus that we depended upon to go after bad guys.” He added that the move “continued to eat away (the morale),” because there were constant reports of the increased return of the released prisoners to battle throughout 2021.
As part of the US-Taliban deal, the Trump administration agreed to an initial reduction of US forces from 13,000 to 8,600 troops by July 2020, followed by a complete withdrawal by 1 May 2021, if the Taliban kept its commitments.
As for the withdrawal of the US troops during the Trump administration, Ambassador Wilson said that the drawdown orders to go to 2,500 were “disconcerting”. On the other hand, Ambassador Khalilzad had said if the Biden administration had reversed the troops withdrawal policy or tried to re-negotiate or invalidate the Doha Agreement, the US would be “back at war” with the Taliban.
Khalilzad also said that he was under “extreme pressure” to complete the military withdrawal before the end of Trump’s presidential term. When grilled about what made him tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 27, 2021, that, “I do not believe the government is going to collapse, that the Taliban is going to take over,” Khalilzad gave varying explanations – from “personal judgment” to “informed by the intel”. He went on to claim that he had “misjudged it based on intelligence, the resolve of the government, and the capabilities of the armed forces, in which we had invested billions of dollars and we thought it was an effective fighting force.”
In August 2021, the US withdrew the last of its troops from Afghanistan, ending its military presence there after nearly 20 years. The US exit resulted in the Taliban regaining control of the country.
