Massive blast hits Kabul as US envoy announces draft deal with Taliban

Bill Van Auken

A massive truck bomb exploded Monday night outside of Kabul’s so-called Green Village, a fortified village housing foreign security contractors and NGOs. The suicide attack, which was claimed by the Taliban, came precisely as US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad was announcing a draft agreement with the Islamist movement in a broadcast on Afghan television.

The blast, which killed at least 16 people and wounded over 100, touched off an angry demonstration. Residents of nearby neighborhoods took to the streets demanding that the foreign contractors be moved out as their presence was leading to the deaths of Afghan civilians, who accounted for nearly all of the casualties, with the exception of three members of the country’s security forces killed in the blast

At one point, Afghan civilians scaled the walls of the compound, setting fire to armored SUVs parked inside. Others threw rocks and Molotov cocktails over the walls. Afghan riot police were brought in to suppress the “unauthorized demonstration,” wounding at least five protesters with live ammunition.

In taking responsibility for the bombing, the Taliban said that the attack was in reaction to bombing of Afghan villages and homes by US occupation forces and the Afghan security forces.

The tentative deal announced by Khalilzad would ostensibly end US imperialism’s 18-year-old intervention in Afghanistan, the longest war in US history. It was reached in nine rounds of negotiations between the US and the Taliban in Qatar’s capital of Doha beginning last January.

According to Khalilzad, it would result in the withdrawal of some 5,400 US troops from Afghanistan beginning roughly five months after the agreement is signed. In return, the Taliban is supposed to guarantee that it will not allow territory under its control to be used by Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and its Afghan affiliate or any other armed group to prepare or launch attacks on the US or any other country.

“We have agreed that if the conditions proceed according to the agreement, we will leave within 135 days five bases in which we are present now,” Khalilzad told Afghanistan’s Tolo television news.

The withdrawal of the remaining 8,600 US troops is to be “conditions-based,” tied to a subsequent round of negotiations between the Taliban and the US-backed regime in Kabul, which was excluded from the Doha negotiations. The Taliban agreed only to negotiate with Washington, and not with the regime headed by President Ashraf Ghani, on the grounds that it is merely a puppet of the US-led occupation.

The US agreement to exclude Ghani’s administration from the talks provided a concrete confirmation of the Taliban’s assessment of the regime. Before appearing on Afghan television, the US envoy Khalilzad showed Ghani the draft agreement that had been hammered out without his participation.

A subsequent round of “Afghan-Afghan” negotiations is supposed to be directed at bringing about a permanent cease-fire in the country’s protracted and bloody conflict, and creating the framework for an interim government that would include the Islamist movement that Washington intervened in October 2001 to topple.

The Taliban has insisted that the talks include the Afghan political opposition and other social groups, with representatives of the government representing only one faction.

For his part, Ghani is attempting to stage an election on September 28 in an attempt to secure some form of legitimacy before such talks. Both the Taliban and Khalilzad have opposed the move, with the latter referring to the US-backed government as “the biggest obstacle” to a peace accord. Ghani’s opponents, including Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, his chief rival in the last election in 2014 with whom he supposedly shares power, have signaled that they are prepared to scrap the vote in the interest of “peace.” No doubt, they are trying to keep their options open should the Taliban return to power.

In statements issued to their own followers, the Taliban leadership has portrayed the results of the negotiations with the US as the third historic triumph of the Afghan people against foreign occupation—following the driving out of the British in the 19th century and then the Soviets at the end of the 1980s. They have also suggested that the movement will be in a position to take Kabul.

According to a Reuters report citing a diplomat monitoring the Doha talks, the draft agreement would end US airstrikes on the Taliban, while the Islamist militia would halt all attacks on US-led occupation forces, including “insider attacks” in which Taliban sympathizers in the Afghan security forces have turned their guns on US “advisers.”

Without US air support, the Afghan security forces would be far less able to resist an offensive by the Taliban, which has already seized more Afghan territory than at any time since it was ousted from power by the 2001 US invasion, controlling or contesting control over nearly half the country.