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No, Afghanistan Is Not Really Vietnam All Over Again
Part of:
The Soapbox
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2020
Extract
On February 29, 2020, the United States and the Afghan Taliban signed an agreement in Doha, Qatar, bringing the United States potentially closer to ending the war in Afghanistan than at any point in the conflict's eighteen-year history. After months of military escalations, negotiations, and recriminations, the United States agreed to a token withdrawal of several thousand forces by August 2020 and to remove all remaining forces by May 2021. The Afghan government had been cut out of the talks, but the United States also vowed to encourage it to release thousands of Taliban prisoners and to enter into its own negotiations with the Taliban in order to pave the way to a permanent ceasefire agreement. For its part, the Taliban agreed to negotiate with Kabul after the troop withdrawals began and to halt cooperation with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
The author would like to thank Fredrik Logevall, Ronald H. Spector, Gregory A. Daddis, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
References
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