Afghan government should seek deal with Taliban to coexist peacefully: US President

WSHINGTON: US President Joe Biden has said the Afghan government should seek a deal with the Taliban to allow them to coexist peacefully.
He said that his administration wanted the Afghan people to decide their own future, rather than sacrificing another generation of Americans in an unwinnable war.
Biden said the Afghan military had the ability to repel the Taliban, whose major advances in recent weeks have raised fears that the country will slide into civil war.
Further trimming the days of stay in Afghanistan, US President Joe Biden has set August 31 as the target date for ending American military mission in Afghanistan. Earlier, the Biden administration had announced to withdraw the troops by September 11.
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“About 650 troops would remain in Kabul to provide security for the US embassy,” he said giving a policy statement about Afghanistan in the White House.
Biden said the United States planned to move thousands of Afghan interpreters out of the country in anticipation of the end of the US military mission in the region.
He called on countries in the region to help bring about an elusive political settlement between the warring parties in Afghanistan.
Biden has admitted that Taliban were in the strongest warfare position since 2001. He also said that the US had achieved the targets of weakening al-Qaeda and stopping them from attacking America.
On the other hand, the Afghan government and Taliban have agreed that “war is not the solution to the Afghanistan problem” and that all efforts must be made for peaceful political solution.
A joint statement, released after the talks between the Afghan government and Taliban representatives in Tehran said that the two sides also agreed to continue talks on the specific mechanisms of establishing an Islamic state at a later meeting.
On July 6, the Pentagon’s Central Command had announced that withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan was more than 90 percent completed.
CentCom had said it had officially handed over seven former US bases to the Afghan security forces and had evacuated the equivalent of nearly 1,000 C-17 air freighter loads of equipment from the country, ahead of the September deadline to complete the pullout.