A senior Pakistan diplomat on Friday stressed the need for the United States to demonstrate urgency in concluding its reassessment of a February 2020 peace pact with Afghanistan’s Taliban to enable the ensuing reconciliation talks between Afghans to move forward.
Pakistan Ambassador to Afghanistan Mansoor Ahmad Khan advised U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration not to alter mutually agreed upon troop withdrawal timelines without consulting the Afghan insurgent group.
“We know the institutional review processes take time in the United States, but we hope that in the interest of taking this process toward its logical conclusion the review will be completed soon,” Khan said while delivering a public talk at the Islamabad Policy Research Institute think tank.
“The U.S.-Taliban agreement has mutual obligations for the parties and … whatever U.S. conclusions come out of this review they have to be addressed through interaction with Taliban,” the envoy stressed.
The Biden administration is studying the February 29 agreement his predecessor sealed with the Taliban one year ago. The document binds Washington to withdraw the remaining 2,500 American soldiers in Afghanistan by May 1, along with nearly 10,000 NATO-led allied troops, to close the longest war in U.S. history.
