Increased Taliban attacks in Afghanistan call into question whether the militant group can be trusted to adhere to a peace plan, two high-ranking members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Friday.
“The dramatic increase in violence in Afghanistan is an unacceptable violation of the Trump Administration’s February agreement with the Taliban,” Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel of New York and Republican Rep. Michael T. McCaul of Texas said in a joint statement.
Engel, chairman of the foreign affairs committee, and McCaul, the group’s ranking Republican, join a chorus of U.S. officials condemning the Taliban for violating the deal signed in Doha, Qatar, meant to end the war.
The deal says that if the Taliban keep terrorists from operating in Afghanistan, stop attacking the U.S. and its allies, and hold intra-Afghan peace talks with the Kabul, foreign forces would begin a phased withdrawal to leave the country in 14 months.
A wave of offensives against Afghan troops followed the signing of the deal, with attacks surging above “seasonal norms,” according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released last week.
This violence must stop, or it will place the deal at risk, Engel and McCaul said.
“The Taliban’s continued attacks on Afghan forces make us question whether the Taliban will uphold its commitments, jeopardize progress towards peace, and prevent negotiations from moving forward,” the congressmen said in the statement.
Other U.S. officials in recent days have also said Taliban attacks on Afghan troops violate the deal, despite such attacks not being expressly prohibited in the released text of the deal.
On Thursday, the U.S. peace envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, tweeted that he pressed Taliban leaders in Qatar on reducing violence in the country and on enacting a cease-fire.
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Tuesday said both the Taliban and the Afghan government were not holding up their ends of the deal. The Afghan government, however, was not a signatory to the deal and the Taliban refused to allow Kabul’s direct participation in the negotiations.
The Taliban and the Afghan government were supposed to start peace talks two months ago, but that hasn’t happened due to a dispute over a prisoner swap the U.S. promised as part of the deal.
A few days before Esper’s comments, the spokesman for U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, Col. Sonny Leggett, said the Taliban violated an unwritten agreement to reduce violence by 80%.
The statement, posted on Twitter last week in an argument with the spokesman for the Taliban, warned the militant group there would be consequences if they did not comply.
