Radio Free Afghanistan
March 21, 2021
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan on March 21 just weeks before Washington is due to withdraw the last of its troops under a deal struck with the Taliban last year.
President Joe Biden said last week in a television interview that it would be “tough” for Washington to meet a May 1 deadline to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, which was laid out in an agreement between former President Donald Trump’s administration and the Taliban on February 29 last year.
Biden said that, even if the deadline was extended, it wouldn’t be prolonged by a “lot longer.”
NBC News last week quoted two sources as saying that Biden was considering keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan until November.
After talks with President Ashraf Ghani on March 21, Austin declined to comment on the deadline.
“That’s the domain of my boss,” he said.
“That’s the…decision that the President (Biden) will make at some point in time, in terms of how he wants to approach this going forward.”
The Taliban on March 19 warned of consequences if Washington doesn’t meet the deadline. Suhail Shaheen, a member of the Taliban negotiation team, told reporters that, if U.S. troops stay beyond May 1, “t will be a kind of violation of the agreement. That violation would not be from our side. . . Their violation will have a reaction.”
The Afghan government accuses the Taliban of doing too little to halt violence since intra-Afghan talks got going in September in Qatar.
An international conference on the way ahead in Afghanistan was held last week in Moscow with the participation of delegations from the United States, Russia, China, and Pakistan as well as representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban.
In a joint statement issued by the U.S. State Department after the conclusion of the March 18 conference, the United States, Russia, China, and Pakistan called on Afghanistan’s warring sides to “engage immediately in discussions on fundamental issues to resolve the conflict.”
With reporting by AP, AFP, and TOLOnews