US President Joe Biden ignored the counsel of senior US diplomats, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who urged him not to pull US troops out of Afghanistan without certain conditions in place, former Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in a transcribed interview released Wednesday.

Khalilzad — who helped negotiate the Doha agreement that led to the complete withdrawal of troops – testified that Biden could have stopped or altered the plan to remove all US forces from Afghanistan by September 2021.

“The State Department — or the secretary and myself, we wanted a conditional withdrawal approach,” he said. “But the ultimate decision was, as we all know, that it was to withdraw based on a timetable.”

Khalilzad said he recommended that the Islamic Emirate and the Afghanistan government at the time reach a separate peace agreement before US troops left the country.

“Secretary Blinken and I, I believe, did recommend that conditionality. That’s my judgment, that conditionality would be the prudent thing to do,” Kalilzad told the committee in his Nov. 8 interview. “But then the response was, ‘Can you get the other side – the Talibs (Islamic Emirate) – not to go back to fighting?”

In his testimony, Khalilzad said such an agreement could have been based on an early 2021 peace negotiation that Khalilzad said visualized a “peace government,” which would have given the Islamic Emirate an equal share of power over Kabul with the then Western-backed Afghan government.

“It was essentially kind of a power-sharing formula that our experts had put together in consultation with outside experts in which the government consists of individuals with ties to both – from the Afghan Government and the Taliban – and be led by somebody acceptable to both sides,” he told the committee.

He said that when reaching such a conditional agreement appeared unlikely, Biden instead decided to move forward with the pullout to avoid IEA attacks on US forces.

Khalilzad said the sudden lack of US support helped enable the Islamic Emirate to retake power, 15 days before the last American service member left the capital.

Khalilzad also told lawmakers that State Department officials had predicted the power-sharing initiative would not have lasted longer than three years without a continued US presence in the country.

He also said at points throughout negotiations with the Islamic Emirate, there were times he believed that the IEA “negotiated merely as a stall tactic to wait out the U.S. until its military forces withdrew to zero.”

Khalilzad believed Biden’s announcement in April 2021 to withdraw all U.S troops negatively affected the morale of the Afghan government forces. He explained that: “The U.S. withdrawal had a psychological impact and negatively affected the relative balance of power for the government. That’s obvious.”