KABUL—U.S. and Taliban negotiators have forged a preliminary deal on two vital points to end the war in Afghanistan, the special U.S. envoy said Monday, as the Afghan president urged the insurgents to negotiate directly with his government.
Washington agreed on the withdrawal of its approximately 14,000 troops from Afghanistan while the insurgents vowed to halt any terrorist attacks abroad from Afghan soil, said a person briefed by a Taliban participant in the talks last week in Qatar.
U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad told local media on Monday that the two sides had struck “agreements in principle on a couple of very important issues.” He gave no details other than to say the U.S. was working with the Afghan government and others to get to a comprehensive cease-fire.
There are still major hurdles to a final peace accord to end America’s longest war.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani insists that the Taliban negotiate face-to-face with the government. “I call on the Taliban…to heed the will of the Afghan people and enter serious talks with the government of Afghanistan,” Mr. Ghani said in a nationally televised address from the presidential palace in Kabul on Monday.
But the talks didn’t include the Afghan government, with which the insurgents have long refused to negotiate, viewing it as an American puppet. The ultraconservative Islamist movement had no immediate response to Mr. Ghani’s call.
A U.S. defense official on Monday also urged caution, saying that talks were far from over and that plans for a complete American withdrawal were premature. The U.S. military also has said it wants to maintain some troops in Afghanistan focused on counterterrorism operations.
Testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Jack F. McKenzie Jr., the new head of U.S. Central Command, said Afghanistan’s security forces were still weak. “If we left precipitously right now, I do not believe they would be able to successfully defend their country,” he said.
Talks over a peace deal have been propelled by reports, most recently last month, that President Trump was prepared to withdraw U.S. forces unilaterally. The administration has since said the president hadn’t decided to draw down troops in Afghanistan nor had he ordered the Pentagon to do so.
But experts on the insurgency say the reports galvanized Taliban efforts to get an agreement while there are still troops in the country and to get something for the war they have waged.
As momentum toward a peace deal has grown, government officials have expressed concerns U.S. and international pressure will build on the Kabul administration to forgo upcoming presidential elections and instead to form an interim administration while Afghans, including the Taliban, negotiate new political arrangements in the country. Such interim rule might undermine Mr. Ghani’s hopes for another term as president.
In his comments to local media, Mr. Khalilzad said he didn’t discuss an interim government with the Taliban, but those assurances were unlikely to assuage the fears of Mr. Ghani and other senior officials in his government.
The talks in Qatar last week were adjourned to give time to technical experts to draw up detailed plans for a withdrawal and a cease-fire, the person briefed by a Taliban participant in the Qatar talks said. They are expected to resume in Qatar in late February.
Mr. Ghani has insisted that negotiations to end the 17-year Afghan war must be “Afghan-led and Afghan-owned.” In his address Monday, he sought to portray the U.S. negotiating effort as part of his government’s peace plan, which he unveiled at a gathering of foreign officials and diplomats in Kabul in February 2018.
“The efforts of the United States in regards to peace is part of our peace plan,” said Mr. Ghani, who earlier this month announced his plans run for another five-year term in office in elections set for July.
But after Washington’s diplomatic efforts to end the war resumed in July 2018 and then accelerated five weeks later with Mr. Khalilzad’s appointment as special envoy, the Afghan-born diplomat appeared to decide that making progress in U.S.-Taliban negotiations first would create the momentum needed for talks among the Taliban, the government and political parties over a power-sharing administration and changes to the constitution urged by the Taliban.
Mr. Khalilzad has briefed Mr. Ghani and his aides regularly by about his progress in the talks, but they have chafed over what they see as their exclusion. Mr. Khalilzad told the New York Times on Monday: “We have a draft of the framework that has to be fleshed out before it becomes an agreement.”
Last month, the government’s efforts to participate in the U.S.-Taliban negotiations reached their nadir, when two top officials in Mr. Ghani’s government were excluded from a round of talks in Abu Dhabi after Mr. Khalilzad had invited them, according to a senior Afghan security official.
In his remarks, Mr. Ghani also said his government wanted a peace deal quickly with the Taliban, whom he described as being in the grip of “enemies.” That was a reference to Pakistan, which played a key role in the formation of the Taliban in the mid-1990s and has continued to use them in varying degrees since then to exert influence in Afghanistan.
He also said that no Afghan wanted foreign troops in the country “for a prolonged period” and that his government was seeking to reduce their number to zero based on a “comprehensive and regular plan,” a plan, he said, that would prevent the outbreak of the kind of anarchy that has afflicted past transitions of power in Afghanistan.
There are about 14,000 U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, about 5,525 of whom support air operations, train Afghan special forces and carry out counterterrorism operations, according the most recent figures provided by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
The remaining American personnel are assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s mission to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces, a force totaling 16,229 people from 39 Nato and non-NATO partner nations, the inspector general says.
Write to Craig Nelson at craig.nelson@wsj.com
