Zalmay Khalilzad, The Former US special representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation has said that the US was losing the war to the Taliban, so it chose peace negotiations as an alternative.
He stepped down as special Afghan representative earlier this month, said the US military tried many times to strengthen its position on the battleground, but it failed.
During in an interview with CBS News’ “Face the Nation” show, Zalmay Khalilzad shared his opinion on what went wrong during the last days of the Afghan withdrawal.
The former US special envoy to Afghanistan said that “The negotiation was a result of based on the judgment that we weren’t winning the war and therefore time was not on our side and better to make a deal sooner than later.” He blamed the then-president Ashraf Ghani for the disintegration of Afghanistan’s security sector, saying his escape triggered chaos in the Afghan capital.
Zalmay Khalilzad further said the Taliban were in discussions with him about forming a power-sharing government and including some officials of the Ghani administration in the next setup. All these things did not happen because Ghani did not stay, He added
He said that Ashraf Ghani did not want to let go of power, and discredited the former Afghan president’s remarks about fleeing Kabul to avoid bloodshed, saying that was not true.
Khalilzad said that “So, the question is, why did President Ghani do what he did? If he was willing to step aside for the sake of peace, imagine if he had offered that a year ago, 6 months ago that somebody that’s mutually acceptable could have led the government. But he did not,”
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