Inside America’s ‘severely botched’ Afghan War mission

After so many years of bloodshed, an agreement inked between the US and the Taliban last February under the former Trump administration for the withdrawal of troops by May 2021 was celebrated as step towards peace.

He said the “deeply defective” agreement gave the Taliban everything they wanted – including the status of a place at the table with the US, the release of 5000 political prisoners and a firm timetable for the completion of troop withdrawal.

“The Taliban got everything so there was no incentive to negotiate seriously with anyone else and in fact, there has been no formal face-to-face meeting between Afghan government delegates and the Taliban since before Christmas,” Dr Maley said.

Dr Maley said Mr Biden was essentially stuck between a rock and a hard place, and that a recent, bipartisan US study into an allied withdrawal of troops found it could be “a recipe for major meltdown in Afghanistan” – but that sadly, that’s how the situation could ultimately play out.

He said Mr Biden now had three options – to ignore the commitment to withdraw, to go ahead with the agreement or to negotiate a one-off extension with the Taliban.

That’s partly because the US has already made major concessions, including agreeing with the Taliban’s interpretation of the agreement that the release of 5000 prisoners was a “target, not the ceiling” and to the release of war criminals instead of only combat or political prisoners – including sergeant Hekmatullah who killed three Australian troops in their barracks.

Dr Maley said it was interesting to note that the agreement was not only for the withdrawal of US troops, but also the troops of its allies, including Australia, and that it didn’t appear that Australia was consulted before the deal was struck, or that the negotiator was given the green light to commit on our behalf.

Now, he said there was a “real danger” of that rhetoric resurfacing in places like Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia – places where Australia has been investing heavily recently in an effort to counter violent extremism.

“We are much more vulnerable in Australia to radical Islamist groups in South-East Asia than is the US, and when people sometimes make the mistake of thinking the Taliban is not a global terrorist group like Al-Qaeda, they miss that ‘inspiration effect’,” he said.

Dr Maley said he believed it was most likely that the US would break the agreement rather than withdrawing from Afghanistan completely come May

He said total withdrawal could cause a “psychological trigger” within Afghanistan where people who were against the Taliban suddenly switched sides if they perceived it was in their best interests to do so, based on which side they expected to come out on top