House Releases Testimony That Suggests a Missed Opportunity For Orderly Withdrawal From Afghanistan

Interesting old testimony about the Afghanistan withdrawal was released yesterday by the House. 

It turns out that former Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad had a recollection of the decisions surrounding the withdrawal that differed from the general narrative about that event. 

See Biden pursued botched Afghanistan withdrawal against diplomats’ advice: ex-negotiator:

Biden could have demanded that the Taliban and Afghanistan government reach a separate peace agreement before US troops left the country, which Khalilzad said was his recommendation.

“Secretary Blinken and I, I believe, did recommend that conditionality. That’s my judgment, that conditionality would be the prudent thing to do,” Kalilzad told the committee in his Nov. 8 interview. “But then the response was, ‘Can you get the other side – the Talibs – not to go back to fighting?”

Such an agreement could have been based on an early 2021 peace negotiation that Khalilzad said visualized a “peace government,” which would have given the Taliban an equal share of power over Kabul with the Western-backed Afghan government.

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Despite the fiasco, Khalilzad told lawmakers that State Department officials had predicted the power-sharing initiative would not have lasted longer than three years without a continued US presence in the country.

However, any agreement may have prevented the Taliban from taking complete control of Afghanistan before US forces departed, allowing for a less panicked and rushed evacuation process.

Khalilzad’s transcript represented the committee’s fifth tranche of documents released this year that related to its investigations into the bugout.

The couple years of breathing space that might have come from a power-sharing government would have prevented the panicky rush to the exits that we saw when the presumptive Afghan government which we left behind collapsed overnight.