{"id":2315,"date":"2019-11-16T04:47:35","date_gmt":"2019-11-16T04:47:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.caps.af\/?p=2315"},"modified":"2019-11-16T04:47:35","modified_gmt":"2019-11-16T04:47:35","slug":"petraeus-taliban-must-break-strong-links-to-al-qaeda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caps.af\/?p=2315","title":{"rendered":"Petraeus: Taliban Must Break \u2018Strong\u2019 Links to Al-Qaeda"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"justify\"><strong>(TOLO News): Former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, in a joint article with Vance Serchuk, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, published an op-ed in the Washington Post on November 14 claiming that the Taliban have \u201cstrong\u201d links with Al-Qaeda, and recommended that any peace deal with the insurgent group should require their \u201cunequivocal break with international terrorism.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Cutting ties to terrorist groups was one of the issues agreed upon in the previous US-Taliban peace talks in Doha, but Petraeus and Serchuk cite \u201cthe experience of recent coalition military operations in Afghanistan\u201d to argue that \u201cal-Qaeda\u2019s links to the Taliban remain strong.\u201d The authors state that \u201cthe Taliban as recently as this summer still wouldn\u2019t admit that al-Qaeda was the 9\/11 perpetrator.\u201d Furthermore, according to the authors, the Taliban should not only break ties with terrorist groups, but they should \u201cshow a willingness to fight them.\u201d Petraeus and Serchuk suggest that a new peace deal should require a nationwide ceasefire, and the withdrawal of US forces should not even be offered as a consideration. The authors suggest that a troop withdrawal would amount to \u201cexchanging America\u2019s military footprint in Afghanistan for Taliban commitments against al-Qaeda,\u201d and would be \u201cespecially ill-considered.\u201d This comes amid attempts to restart peace talks with a proposed swap of Haqqani Network members for two Taliban-held Western professors. President Ghani announced on Tuesday that Anas Haqqani, Mali Khan and Hafiz Rashid would be released \u201cconditionally,\u201d but the swap has been postponed and sources say the three prisoners have been returned to Bagram prison. A number of Kabul residents gathered to protest their release on Friday. \u201cWith the release of Anas Haqqani, the Afghan government has proven its slavery,\u201d Selay Ghafar, member of the Solidarity Party of Afghanistan. The decision to release the three members of the Haqqani network was strongly criticized by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). &#8220;Unless justice, accountability and the rule of law are taken into account, then peace cannot be fair and endorsed by the Afghan people,\u201d said Zabihullah Farhang, media director of AIHRC. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, on the other hand, says they will not release two US university professors unless Anas Haqqani, Mali Khan and Hafiz Rashid are released. \u201cSo far, the necessary trust between the Americans and the Taliban has not developed and this could be one of the reasons,\u201d said Abdulrahman Wardak, Afghan parliament member.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(TOLO News): Former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, in a joint article with Vance Serchuk, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, published an op-ed in the Washington Post on November 14 claiming that the Taliban have \u201cstrong\u201d links with Al-Qaeda, and recommended that any peace [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archived-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2316,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315\/revisions\/2316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}