Amrullah Saleh, Afghanistan’s former first vice president, has said promises by the United States and its Western allies to transfer large numbers of military personnel, journalists, civil society activists and employees of institutions linked to the republican system to Western countries played a role in weakening the former government and paved the way for the Taliban administration to take control of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
In a Facebook post, Saleh wrote that after 2018, the United States and its Western partners had promised to relocate about 300,000 members of the republican system, civil society activists and people working in the media, charities and development programmes. According to him, the issuance of ‘special immigrant visas’ for those who had worked with institutions linked to the United States was one of the main channels of this process.<\/p>\n
He claimed that in early 2020, officials in Afghanistan’s former government tried to persuade the United States not to offer visa promises and welfare benefits to commanders and members of Afghanistan’s special forces. Saleh wrote that these promises affected the morale of security forces and influenced their calculations about whether to remain within the government’s military structure.<\/p>\n
Saleh also wrote that some people were worried they would be denied these benefits if they did not align with Zalmay Khalilzad’s approach and the Doha negotiations process. He accused Zalmay Khalilzad, then the US special envoy for Afghan peace, and Western countries of managing the Doha talks in a way that portrayed Ashraf Ghani and himself as obstacles to peace.<\/p>\n
According to the former first vice president, this process created the impression that removing the president and his deputy was enough to reach an agreement with the Taliban administration. He also accused some media outlets of helping weaken the republican government by publishing narratives backed by foreign funding.<\/p>\n
Amrullah Saleh went to Panjshir on August 14, 2021, one day before the fall of Kabul, and organised the National Resistance Front with Ahmad Massoud against the Taliban administration. He left Panjshir about a week later and has been outside Afghanistan ever since.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Amrullah Saleh says US and Western promises to relocate Afghans weakened the former government and helped the Taliban take power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20649,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,4,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-politics","category-secondary-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}