President Ashraf Ghani, who reported speaking on the phone with US President Donald Trump on Saturday, told CNN during an interview on Sunday that Trump has not asked him to release the Taliban prisoners.
“I received a phone call from President Trump today, congratulating me on yesterday’s important developments with regards to the evolving peace process. POTUS expressed his confidence in the Afghan government’s leadership and state capacity to lead the next steps in process,” President Ghani tweeted.
During the CNN interview, in a response to a question about the discussed release of 5,000 prisoners, Ghani said: “President Trump is not asking me to release these people. We have not made a commitment to release them,” Ghani said, adding that “It’s a sovereign Afghan decision.”
He also said that the wording used in the agreement is that the US would facilitate. “We have made it very clear to Ambassador (Zalmay) Khalilzad (the US peace envoy for Afghanistan) that the political capital and the consensus in the country that would be necessary for such a major step does not exist today.”
“We need to see that significant issues, a permanent ceasefire discussion of this special relationship of the Taliban to the countries that provide them sanctuary, especially Pakistan, their relationship with all terrorist organizations, relationships –not just Al-Qaeda–their relationship with drug cartels, and, most fundamentally, the basic rights of the people of Afghanistan, the place of our security forces and our civilian administration are all discussed,” he mentioned.
“It is very clearly conveyed to them that they cannot put preconditions. Just technically it’s not possible to release 5,000 prisoners,” he added.
“It’s a painstaking process, each person needs to be checked, and in return–for what? We need to understand that the Afghan people have to see continuous commitment, not a sense of false claims of victory because all our forces and our government capabilities are intact,” Ghani said.
On Saturday, Taliban’s top negotiator Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai in an interview after the signing of US and Taliban agreement said that intra-Afghan talks will start only after the release of the 5,000 prisoners of the group who are in the captivity of the Afghan government.
