Former US special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, has said that it would have been better to get the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) involved in negotiations or deliberations about the future early on.

Speaking in a podcast released by Doha Debates, Khalilzad said that senior IEA members had met chairman of the interim authority in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, following the Bonn negotiations, saying they would accept the new authority, provided that they could live in honor and dignity in their homes and not to be pursued and prosecuted.

He noted that the anger and feelings of the US leadership at that time would have made it difficult to reconcile with the IEA, but the IEA members, in conversations in Doha, blamed Karzai and the Northern Alliance figures.

“They (IEA) thought that 20 years of war and all the loss of life on all sides of Afghanistan was due to that mistake, as they saw it, to that neglect by President Karzai,” he said.

The former US diplomat recalled that President Donald Trump decided in 2018 to get troops out of Afghanistan believing the US wouldn’t succeed in winning the war and that priorities had changed.

Khalilzad said that he kept insisting in talks with the IEA that nothing would be agreed to until everything is agreed to, but there was this messaging from Washington and a desire not to link, too tightly, withdrawal to the agreement between the government and the IEA because of an assumption that the “Afghans would not agree with each other.”

On the two secret annexes of the Doha Agreement, Khalilzad said that they were about the specifics of the withdrawal process and terrorism issues, not the future Afghan government.

He emphasized that the Doha agreement meets the core concerns of the United States as not as single American was killed by the IEA during the 18 months and IEA is living up to its commitments regarding terrorism.