KABUL (Dispatches) – NATO allies were kept in the dark about the U.S. deal with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, an inquiry heard.
A German diplomat said the deal was only shown to allies a day before it was announced in February 2020, The National News reported.
“We all hoped it would be better negotiated than it really was,” they said.
Another official said the U.S. had ignored pleas to withdraw when conditions allowed, rather than setting a hard deadline.
The revelations were made to a German parliamentary committee investigating the exit from Afghanistan.
U.S. and NATO forces ended their 20-year occupation of Afghanistan last year, prompting the swift return to power of the Taliban.
The U.S. had agreed to withdraw under the 2020 deal, in return for Taliban promises to negotiate peace and prevent terrorism.
A former aide to Germany’s NATO staff said allies hoped the U.S. would make its withdrawal conditional on the Taliban meeting its commitments.
Instead, they told the closed-door inquiry that they found the agreement vague and were surprised that all U.S. troops would leave.
German diplomats had to transcribe the text of deal because officials in Donald Trump’s administration would not even let them take away a copy, the inquiry heard.
It echoed a report in August that British officials were kept out of the loop when secret annexes were added to the deal.
The second witness, a former director for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the German Foreign Ministry, said Berlin had raised its concerns with U.S. officials.
They said plans for a German withdrawal were not made immediately because of the possibility that a new U.S. president would come to power.
Joe Biden did defeat Trump in the 2020 election and allies made another attempt to rethink the deal once he came to power.
However, no consensus could be reached with the U.S. on linking the troop withdrawal to positive developments on the ground, the inquiry heard.
“We tried to couple together the military and civilian matters. We were not particularly successful,” the foreign ministry official said.
Biden announced in April 2021 that the U.S. withdrawal would go ahead, and NATO allies swiftly fell in behind him.