IRIA News

Top officials of the United States and the Taliban government held an in-person meeting on October 9 in Qatar, for the first time since Al Qaeda leader Zawahiri was killed in a drone strike in Kabul.

The U.S. delegation was led by CIA deputy director David Cohen, while the United States Department of State’s Special Representative for Afghanistan Tom West, who has previously led talks with the Taliban since the U.S. forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, was also present at the meeting.

The American officials arrived in Doha, Qatar to meet with a Taliban delegation led by the head of intelligence Abdul Haq Wasiq.

The U.S. Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency did not comment on the meeting. However, the former Deputy Director of National Intelligence who led Afghanistan analysis at the CIA, Beth Sanner told CNN that the U.S. delegation probably delivered “a firm message that we will conduct more strikes as we did against Zawahiri if we find that al Qaeda members in Afghanistan are supporting operations that threaten the US or its allies.”

Sanner further said that “The Taliban are struggling to prevent ISIS-K attacks, making them look feckless, particularly in Kabul… ISIS-K [an affiliate of the Islamic State militant group active in South Asia and Central Asia] now poses an internal Afghan threat, to the Taliban and to sectarian stability given ISIS-K’s focus on killing Shias, but there is some reasonable concern that ISIS-K could ultimately turn its sights on external plotting if the Taliban is unable to contain them.”

The U.S. conducted a drone strike on a residential house in the Sherpur area of Kabul on July 30, which resulted in the death of the Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and strained already tense relations between the U.S. and the Kabul government. Taliban chief spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid condemned the attack in a statement. “Such actions are a repetition of the failed experiences of the past 20 years and are against the interests of the U.S., Afghanistan, and the region,” Mujahid said.

Despite unsettling ties, the U.S. and the Taliban continued to engage in negotiations on critical issues. In September 2022, one of the most significant prisoner swaps took place between the United States and the Taliban-led Afghanistan government. Afghanistan’s Taliban freed American engineer and Navy veteran Mark Frerichs in exchange for Taliban-linked Afghan tribal leader Bashir Noorzai.

After the prisoner swap, Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said during a press conference that “After long negotiations, U.S. citizen Mark Frerichs was handed over to an American delegation, and that delegation handed over (Bashar Noorzai) to us today at Kabul airport.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed Frerichs’s release and committed to working to free other Americans “arbitrarily and unjustly” detained abroad.

On February 11, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order creating a possibility to split $7 billion in Afghan funds into two parts, allocating half to the humanitarian aid for Afghanistan and keeping the second half for the families of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks.

The executive order states that the U.S. administration would facilitate access to the $3.5 billion of the assets belonging to the Afghan Central Bank, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB). The DAB funds are being held at the U.S. Federal Reserves in New York. However, the U.S. is yet to release the funds due to trust issues in Afghanistan’s institutions that the U.S. believes cannot guarantee that the funds will benefit the local people.

The previous Afghan government was 75% dependent upon international aid to run state affairs. Since the Taliban took control, many international governments and institutions cut off their financial support to Afghanistan causing the Afghan humanitarian crisis to worsen even more.