/In historic call, Trump speaks to Taliban leader amid concerns about deal with US

In historic call, Trump speaks to Taliban leader amid concerns about deal with US

Days after his administration signed a deal with the Taliban, President Donald Trump spoke to its leaders in a historic call — the first known conversation between an American president and the militant group that harbored the al Qaeda operatives responsible for the Sept. 11th attacks.

The conversation, which Trump described Tuesday as “a very good talk,” comes as that agreement to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and begin Afghan peace negotiations seems threatened by renewed violence and a dispute over releasing Taliban prisoners.

“We had a good conversation. We’ve agreed there’s no violence. We don’t want violence. We’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters as he departed the White House.

Trump spoke to the Taliban’s co-founder and chief negotiator Abdul Ghani Baradar, also known as Mullah Baradar, according to the militant group’s spokesperson, who said the call lasted 35 minutes.

“If the United States honors the agreement concluded with us, then we will have positive future bilateral relations,” Baradar told Trump, according to his spokesperson.

According to the Taliban, Trump told Baradar, “It is a pleasure to talk to you. You are a tough people and have a great country, and I understand that you are fighting for your homeland. We have been there for 19 years, and that is a very long time, and withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan now is in the interest of everyone.”

The agreement signed Saturday in Doha, Qatar, where chief U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad spent a year and a half negotiating with Baradar and others, lays out a full U.S. withdrawal, if the Taliban meet certain commitments — to engage in national peace negotiations with other Afghans and to prevent Afghanistan from being a safe haven to terror groups, specifically including al Qaeda.

To kick that process off, the U.S. agreed to drawn down its forces from approximately 13,000 to 8,600 and close its five major military bases within 135 days, while the Taliban agreed to meet an Afghan national delegation for negotiations on March 10. The militant group does not recognize the government of President Ashraf Ghani, decrying it as a U.S. puppet, but members of the government will join civil society, tribal leaders and women in a “personal” capacity to make up the Afghan national team.

But in the days since the agreement was signed by Baradar and Khalilzad, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a witness, there’s growing concern that those intra-Afghan negotiations won’t happen.

Despite Trump’s comment about “no violence,” the Taliban announced Monday that it would resume attacks on Afghan government forces, but not U.S. forces. Senior U.S. administration officials had said that a week-long deal to reduce violence before the signing ceremony would continue, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper reiterated that Monday: “Our expectation is that a reduced level of violence would occur, and it would decrease over time as we move forward.”

The Taliban, however, conducted 33 attacks across 16 provinces from Monday into Tuesday, killing at least six Afghan civilians and wounding 14 others, according to an Afghan Ministry of Interior spokesperson, while five Afghan policemen were killed in an attack on a security checkpoint Tuesday, reported Reuters.

Perhaps an even bigger impediment to talks now is a disagreement over releasing Taliban prisoners. The U.S.-Taliban agreement says the U.S. will facilitate the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government and up to 1,000 from the “other side” held by the Taliban, all of whom “will be released” by March 10 when negotiations begin. But a separate joint statement signed by the U.S. and Afghan governments on Saturday says only Ghani’s government will discuss the “feasibility of releasing significant numbers of prisoners on both sides,” without committing to any number or time frame.

“We have not made a commitment to release them. It’s a sovereign Afghan decision. We will discuss the question of prisoners as part of a peace deal, which has to be comprehensive,” Ghani told CNN on Sunday, refusing to release any Taliban prisoners until those negotiations begin.

But the Taliban spokesperson said Monday the militant group will not participate in the negotiations until prisoners are released, leaving talks up in the air.

“Do not allow anyone to take actions that violate the terms of the agreement, thus embroiling you even further in this prolonged war,” Baradar told Trump in their call, according to his spokesperson — urging him to pressure Ghani to release prisoners.

Trump seemed to agree, reportedly telling Baradar that Pompeo “shall soon talk with Ashraf Ghani in order to remove all hurdles facing the intra-Afghan negotiations.”

The White House has not yet provided its own readout of the call.

The State Department did not respond to questions about whether Pompeo called Ghani, but he was dismissive of Ghani’s statements on Monday: “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the habits of old days are hard to be break and this will be a bumpy road going forward,” he told Fox News in an interview.

Khalilzad, the chief U.S. negotiator seen with Baradar during the Trump call in a photo released by the Taliban, had been conducting some shuttle diplomacy between the rival Afghan political factions to push them along in their roles in the peace process. Pompeo alluded to that, saying the U.S. was “determined to get there” and push the process forward.

ABC News’s Ben Gittleson contributed to this report from the White House and Aleem Agha from Kabul, Afghanistan.

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