US envoy who brokered Afghan exit steps down
WASHINGTON — Zalmay Khalilzad, the veteran envoy whose months of patient hotel ballroom diplomacy helped end the United States’ longest war in Afghanistan but failed to prevent a Taliban takeover, resigned on Monday.
In a letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Khalilzad defended his record but acknowledged that he came up short, and said he wanted to step aside during the “new phase of our Afghanistan policy”.
“The political arrangement between the Afghan government and the Taliban did not go forward as envisaged,” he wrote.
Shortly before Khalilzad’s resignation became public, the US State Department said the US would not be able to attend a new session called on by Russia.
Zamir Kabulov, Russia’s special envoy for Afghanistan, said on Friday that Russia had invited the US to participate in the talks on Afghanistan in Moscow, which would focus on post-conflict reconstruction and humanitarian assistance.
Russia has invited Taliban representatives to the meeting slated for Wednesday. The Moscow-format consultations on Afghanistan were launched in 2017 on the basis of the six-party mechanism for consultations among representatives from Russia, Afghanistan, China, Pakistan, Iran and India.
Born in Afghanistan, the dapper 70-year-old Khalilzad was an academic who became a US diplomat. He assumed senior positions as part of former president George W. Bush’s inner circle, becoming the US ambassador to Kabul, then Baghdad and the United Nations.
As former president Donald Trump itched to end the war in Afghanistan, he brought back Khalilzad, who led exhaustive talks with the Taliban without the US-backed government in Kabul.
Those talks led to a February 2020 agreement in which US troops would leave the following year.
But peace talks between the Taliban and the authorities in Kabul failed to gain traction, and the government that the US built over 20 years crumbled within days as US troops left.
With a deep understanding of Afghan language and customs, Khalilzad was a rare US diplomat able to develop cordial rapport with Taliban leaders whose rule was toppled by the US after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks over its welcome to al-Qaida.
Lightning rod for criticism
Despite his Republican affiliation, Khalilzad was kept in place when Democratic President Joe Biden decided to go ahead with the withdrawal.
Khalilzad soon became a lightning rod for criticism, even with his superiors in the Biden administration faulting the diplomacy behind the 2020 agreement, though voicing respect for him personally.
Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington and now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said Khalilzad failed by equating “US withdrawal with peace”.
“Khalilzad handed the keys of Kabul to the Taliban in return for promises everyone knew the Taliban would not keep,” Haqqani said.
Blinken said Thomas West, Khalilzad’s deputy, would take over as the special envoy.