But in 2018 President Donald Trump, determined to end the war with or without the Afghan President’s involvement, appointed a special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, to negotiate directly with the Taliban, which had representatives in Doha. For years, peace talks were stalled by the Taliban’s refusal to speak with the Afghan government. The Islamic Republic’s last chapter followed a strikingly similar course. Helicopters evacuated the last American personnel from the rooftop of the U.S. Two years later, North Vietnam and Vietcong guerrillas conquered South Vietnam. In January, 1973, the United States signed a pact called the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam and withdrew all its combat forces. “Well, if they’re that collapsible, maybe they just have to be collapsed,” Nixon said. “I think there is one chance in four,” Kissinger told him. In October, 1972, Nixon asked Henry Kissinger, his national-security adviser, about the likelihood of South Vietnam’s survival. President Richard Nixon, who regarded the negotiations mainly as political cover for America’s withdrawal from the war, knew that the terms under discussion would leave South Vietnam, America’s ally, vulnerable. On May 10, 1968, in Paris, the United States opened peace talks with North Vietnam. She returned to Kabul and went from embassy to embassy requesting visas for her staff. “I ended up crying a lot that evening,” Akbar said. through July 4th, and listened to Biden’s speech marking the holiday, in which he said, “We’re about to see our brightest future.” After the official visit, she stayed in the U.S. She recalled being stunned to hear that many of the Americans had already “concluded that Afghanistan was a lost cause, and had sort of made peace with themselves.” They asked her what contingency plans she was making to flee Kabul and go into exile. While Ghani and his aides met with Biden, Shaharzad Akbar, the chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, conferred in Washington with Americans working in human rights, democracy, and development. The likelihood of the Taliban “doing anything rational is not very high,” Biden said, according to the Afghan officials present. But the talks had fallen apart, and the Taliban seemed determined to seize Afghanistan by force. withdrawal and to foster separate peace talks between the insurgents and Kabul. American diplomats had been talking with the Taliban for years, to negotiate a U.S. Amrullah Saleh, the First Vice-President, who said that he felt “backstabbed” by Biden’s decision to withdraw, reluctantly agreed to “stick to a rosy narrative.”īiden and Ghani also discussed the possibility of a peace agreement between the Islamic Republic and the Taliban. to give them more support in their ongoing war with the Taliban. Still, Ghani recommended that they present “one message to the Americans” of resilient unity, which might persuade the U.S. The Afghan officials knew that Biden regarded their government as hopelessly fractious and ineffective. As the plane flew above the Atlantic, they sat on the cabin floor reviewing talking points for the meeting. On June 23rd, Ghani and his advisers boarded a chartered Kam Air jet that would take them from Kabul to Washington, D.C., to meet with Biden. Ghani reminded them, “America didn’t make a promise that they would be here forever.” In every meeting, “he assured us, and encouraged us,” Rangina Hamidi, the acting minister of education, said. Yet its President, Ashraf Ghani, insisted to his cabinet that the Republic would endure. By mid-June, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan-the brittle democratic state built by Afghan modernizers, NATO soldiers, and American taxpayers after the 9/11 attacks-appeared to be in a death spiral. In the following weeks, the Taliban conquered dozens of rural districts and closed in on major cities. On April 14th, President Joe Biden ended the longest war in United States history, announcing that the last remaining American troops in Afghanistan would leave by September 11th.
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