Zamir Kabulov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy to Afghanistan, bizarrely claimed on Wednesday that the Taliban is “flawlessly” adhering to the terms of the peace agreement negotiated in Qatar, while the United States is violating it.
The Taliban is steadily escalating terrorist violence across the country and launching major offensives to capture key cities.
Kabulov based his assertion on the Taliban refraining from killing American soldiers, as promised in the peace deal, while they continue to kill others. The Taliban managed to kill some of their own on Tuesday when an improvised explosive device (IED) accidentally detonated during a bomb-making class held inside a mosque near the Uzbekistan border, killing 30 terrorist instructors and students.
“The Taliban adhere to the agreement almost flawlessly – not a single American soldier has died since the agreement was signed – which cannot be said about the Americans,” Kabulov told Russian state media, accusing the U.S. of “repeatedly” violating the agreement conducting airstrikes against Taliban forces “under various pretexts.”
The Russian envoy warned that if the Biden administration does not withdraw U.S. troops on schedule in May, it would “violate the agreement with the Taliban” and unleash the insurgents to attack Americans again.
According to Kabulov, Russia is working to put together a multilateral meeting with the U.S., China, Iran, and Pakistan to create a “collective mechanism to push the warring Afghan sides to return to the table,” restarting stalled peace negotiations between the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan.
Kabulov said Russia wishes to see “the establishment of a transitional coalition government” that could “lead and control” both the Taliban and the Afghan civilian government. He declared continuing negotiations in Qatar were pointless and claimed U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad was receptive to the idea of holding further talks in Moscow.
Kabulov admitted the Taliban seemed a bit too focused on establishing a fundamentalist “emirate” and taking control of the entire country, which could lead to a “bad scenario,” but placed most of the blame for wavering negotiations on the elected government.
“The Kabul administration has already done a lot of stupid things: It delayed the start of negotiations in anticipation of a change of administration in Washington, thinking that the next administration would behave differently,” he said, blaming the breakdown in negotiations on the government rather than the wave of Taliban attacks.
“No one should just close their eyes and say that the Taliban adhered to the terms. If that was the case, Afghans would have lived in a cease-fire and peace, the talks would continue and there would have been a solution. Taliban are the main violator and they are at war with Afghans,” shot back Sediq Sediqqi, a senior official with the Afghan interior ministry.
Both American military commanders and Biden administration officials have pointed to renewed Taliban violence as the reason peace talks have frozen and the withdrawal of U.S. troops might need to be delayed. The Pentagon and U.N. monitors are also concerned about the Taliban’s continuing ties with al-Qaeda, despite pledging to halt all cooperation with international terrorist organizations during peace negotiations.
“There is still clearly a close relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We believe that the top leadership of al-Qaeda is still under Taliban protection,” U.N. counterterrorism coordinator Edmund Fitton-Brown said on Tuesday.
Observers from the U.S. military to the U.N. and NATO insist the Taliban is lying when it claims foreign fighters and international terrorists, including all members of al-Qaeda, have left Afghanistan. Two Taliban commanders admitted to NBC News on Tuesday that foreign fighters are still present, in clear violation of the Taliban’s commitments and public statements, but claimed they have required all of their “foreign guests” to refrain from attacking Americans.
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