A SEVEN-DAY ‘reduction in violence’ between the US and the Afghan Taliban began on February 21, with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying, as he signed up for the deal: ‘This is an important step on a long road to peace.’
Taliban negotiators have assured the USA that a ‘suitable security situation’ will be created ahead of signing a full deal to ‘lay the groundwork for peace across the country with the withdrawal of all foreign forces’.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed the move, adding that this is ‘a critical test of the Taliban’s willingness and ability to reduce violence, and contribute to peace in good faith’. To prove the US’s ‘good faith’ the Afghan official government has been kept out of the negotiations.
‘We have come to an understanding with the Taliban on a significant reduction in violence across Afghanistan,’ Secretary of State Pompeo said in a statement. He added: ‘Upon a successful implementation of this understanding, signing of the US-Taliban peace agreement is expected to move forward. We are preparing for the signing to take place on 29th February’.
The US has spent billions of dollars since 2001 fighting the Taliban, losing thousands of soldiers in the fight. Now the mighty USA cannot wait to surrender Afghanistan to the Taliban! Oh how the mighty have fallen.
President Donald Trump, pledged during his 2016 presidential campaign that he would end the US war in Afghanistan. Trump’s peace drive began in December 2018, when the Taliban announced they would meet US officials to try to find a ‘roadmap to peace’.
The Taliban was then, and still is refusing to hold official talks with the Afghan puppet government, which the US is now planning to desert and leave to its fate.
As long ago as September 2019, Washington’s top negotiator announced that the US would withdraw 5,400 troops from Afghanistan within 20 weeks as part of a deal agreed ‘in principle’ with Taliban militants.
But days later, Trump said the talks were ‘dead’, after the militant group admitted to killing a US soldier.
Trump reckoned: ‘They thought that they had to kill people to put themselves in a little better negotiating position’, calling the attack ‘a big mistake’.
In fact, in the months since that deal collapsed the Taliban have not ceased fighting, stressing that the USA would ‘lose the most’ by cancelling the talks.
Now the US is looking for a Taliban leadership that it can surrender to.
Its intervention into Afghanistan began in the month after the 11th September 2001 attack when the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden who was hiding in Afghanistan.
The US was joined by an international coalition and the Taliban were quickly removed from power. However, they later emerged as an insurgent force and continued deadly attacks, destabilising subsequent Afghan governments.
The international coalition ended its combat mission in 2014, staying only to train Afghan forces. But the US continued its own scaled-back combat operation, including air strikes.
Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers have been killed and injured. Nearly 3,500 members of the international coalition forces have died in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, more than 2,300 of them American.
The figures for Afghan civilians, militants and government forces are more difficult to quantify. In a February 2019 report, the UN said that more than 32,000 civilians had died. The Watson Institute at Brown University says 58,000 security personnel and 42,000 opposition combatants have been killed.
Now all of Asia is watching the US surrender in Afghanistan. This is spelling out for all to see that US imperialism cannot cope with what Lenin called the ‘Awakening of Asia’ and will be driven out of all of Asia, including Syria and the Middle East.
In fact the rise of the Democrats’ socialist candidate for the US Presidency, Sanders, shows that the US working class is now on the march. The conditions are being created for the workers of the world to carry out the victory of the world socialist revolution!
