The President of the High Council for National Reconciliation, Abdullah Abdullah, visited the heads of state and government in Islamabad and New Delhi in October 2020 to convince them to support a peace agreement in Afghanistan. [145] A senior Pakistani official said that India wanted to “waste” peace in Afghanistan. [146] Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed his commitment to a peaceful Afghanistan. [147] India confirmed “active participation” in the intra-Afghanistan negotiations in Doha. [148] Contrary to the agreement between the United States and the Taliban, the joint statement explicitly refers to Al Qaeda terrorist groups and the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Chorasan, not to “armed groups. The United States and NATO have committed to training Afghan security forces (in accordance with existing security agreements [PDF]) and conducting counter-terrorism operations, while the Afghan government has pledged to prevent these terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a base and continuing to conduct counter-terrorism and anti-drug operations. On May 17, 2020, Ghani signed a power-sharing agreement with his rival Abdullah Abdullah. The agreement ended the long-running dispute over the outcome of Afghanistan`s 2019 presidential elections and put Abdullah in charge of peace negotiations. [135] On 27 February 2018, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani proposed unconditional peace talks with the Taliban, after an upsurge in violence, which offered them recognition as a legal political party and the release of Taliban prisoners. The offer was the most advantageous for the Taliban since the beginning of the war. It was preceded by several months of national consensus, which revealed that Afghans overwhelmingly supported the end of the war. [61] [62] Two days earlier, the Taliban had called for talks with the United States and said, “America and its allies must now see that the issue of Afghanistan cannot be resolved militarily. America must now focus on a peaceful strategy for Afghanistan rather than war. [63] On March 27, 2018, a 20-country conference in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, supported the Afghan government`s offer of peace to the Taliban.
[64] However, the Taliban did not respond publicly to Ghani`s offer. [Citation required] The internal cohesion and weaknesses of the Afghan government and the Taliban will also play a role in the ability of all parties, including the United States, to implement these agreements. On February 29, 2020, the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement that was to be a first step towards an intra-Afghan peace agreement. The main provisions of the agreement were the U.S. commitment to withdraw all U.S. and foreign troops from Afghanistan, a Taliban promise to prevent Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups from using Afghan territory to threaten the United States and its partners, and a promise from both sides to support peace negotiations within Afghanistan. As part of the agreement, the United States promised to reduce the number of U.S. troops from about 14,000 to 8,600 troops, proportionately reduce the number of other international forces in Afghanistan, and cooperate with both sides to release the prisoners. There have been some remarkable problems with the agreement, such as the Afghan government`s lack of involvement in the negotiations. It was an attempt to make the most of a bad situation. Nevertheless, Taliban attacks decreased significantly in April and the first ten days of May.
Compared to the same period last year, unilateral attacks on government forces have fallen by more than half.