WP: Taliban made secret deals with Afghan military to surrender weapons

Since the beginning of 2020, militants of the radical Taliban movement have secretly negotiated with Afghan security forces for their surrender or desertion for a fee, Report informs referring to The Washington Post.

The deals, initially offered early last year, were often described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were, in fact, offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a US official.

Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police, special operations troops and other soldiers.

“Some just wanted the money,” an Afghan special forces officer said of those who first agreed to meet with the Taliban. But others saw the US commitment to a complete withdrawal as an “assurance” that the militants would return to power in Afghanistan and wanted to secure their place on the winning side, he said. The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity because he, like others in this report, was not authorized to disclose information to the press.

The Doha agreement, designed to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan, instead left many Afghan forces demoralized, bringing into stark relief the corrupt impulses of many Afghan officials and their tenuous loyalty to the country’s central government. Some police officers complained that they had not been paid in six months or more.