KABUL – NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday thatAlliance’s troops will not stay in Afghanistan “longer than necessary”, butso far the military presence is needed to achieve a “peaceful solution” tothe conflict in this country.
“We will not stay longer than necessary, but we will not leave before wehave a situation, which enables to leave or reduce the number of troopswithout jeopardizing the main goal of our presence”, Stoltenberg said at ameeting with US Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan.
Stoltenberg added that it is “too early to speculate” on the issueof withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, because now it is necessaryto support efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.
“We strongly support those efforts… We are in close contact with the UnitedStates… Our military presence, the purpose of that is to create theconditions for the political solution, and we hope that we will be ableto achieve that”, Stoltenberg noted.
US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzadon Monday confirmed that recent talks between the United States and theTaliban* in Qatar had made significant progress on vital issues.
In particular, Khalilzad told the New York Times that the two sides hadreached an agreement in principle on a framework for a peace deal thatwould see foreign troops withdraw from Afghanistan over a period of 18months. The agreement is yet to be signed, and the dates of itsimplementation reportedly remain unclear.
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In December, the US-based media reported that the Trump Administration hadplanned to withdraw around 7,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan. Thereports came in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s announcementregarding his intention to pull US troops out of Syria since, accordingto him, the Daesh terrorists had been defeated. However, the White Househas dismissed the claims about Afghanistan, saying that Trump had no suchplans.
Afghanistan has long been in a state of turmoil, with the governmentfighting the Taliban, which has been regularly launching offensives in thecountry’s key big cities. The Taliban movement has been one of the majorforces opposing Kabul in the latter’s long-standing confrontationwith various rebel and terror groups. The group managed to seize powerin the middle of the 1990s before being overthrown in 2001, onlyto continue fighting the government as insurgents.
The situation has been exacerbated by the activities of the Daesh**terrorist group, which has been reportedly operating in Afghanistansince 2015.
There are currently around 14,000 US troops in Afghanistan, in additionto the around 16,000 servicemen from NATO and bloc’s partner states. -Sputnik
