As the US presidential election approaches, Donald Trump said on Wednesday October 7 that he wanted to withdraw all American soldiers from Afghanistan by Christmas.

"We should bring home by Christmas the small number of our brave men and women who still serve in Afghanistan!" Tweeted the US president, who will seek a second term on November 3 against Democrat Joe Biden.

The Republican billionaire has been promising for years to "put an end to endless wars" and has never hidden that he hoped to accelerate the withdrawal as the presidential election approaches.

The Trump administration has pledged to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by mid-2021 at the latest in a landmark deal signed Feb. 29 with the Taliban to end America's longest war.

In return, the insurgents pledged not to let terrorists operate from the territories they control, and to enter into unprecedented direct peace negotiations with the government in Kabul.

These began in September, several months late, and have not yet resulted in an agreement to reduce violence or even conclude a ceasefire.

Despite these meager progress, the US military has started to withdraw at the pace set out in the agreement, if not faster.

In September, there were 8,600 American soldiers in Afghanistan, but the Pentagon had indicated that a new phase of the withdrawal was imminent.

The negotiations stall

Donald Trump's message, halfway between the presidential announcement and the campaign pledge, comes as the Doha peace talks stall.

These negotiations in Qatar aim to end 19 years of war in Afghanistan but have been slowed down by disagreements over the code of conduct to be adopted in the discussions.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Tuesday called on the Taliban to "have the courage to declare a national ceasefire" during a visit to Doha.

In the meantime, violence is still raging in the country.

A suicide attack targeting a provincial governor killed eight people on Monday.

The US envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, said Wednesday that the violence was "too much", while assuring that the insurgents were "quite serious about the negotiations".

"Many thought that they would not negotiate with the Afghan government, that they only wanted an agreement on the withdrawal of American forces. But they are now at the same table", he pleaded during a video intervention at a conference of the Pearson Institute of the University of Chicago.

Joe Biden also in favor of withdrawal

The intervention in Afghanistan, launched in October 2001, cost the United States more than $ 1 trillion and the lives of some 2,400 American soldiers.

But after quickly ousting the Taliban from power, accused of harboring Al-Qaeda, the nebula jihadist responsible for the September 11 attacks, Washington and its allies have never been close to victory on the ground.

In the United States, the principle of withdrawal is increasingly shared on the right and on the left as well as in public opinion, even if a certain number of political leaders, in particular among the neoconservative Republicans, warn against the risk to see terrorist groups again using Afghanistan as a rear base.

Joe Biden, he had opposed the sending of reinforcements when he was vice-president of Barack Obama, but his point of view did not prevail.

On his campaign site, the 70-year-old Democrat also promises to "end endless wars" and to repatriate "the vast majority" of American troops from Afghanistan, while maintaining a narrow, fuzzy mission to counter al-Qaeda and the Islamic State jihadist group.

With AFP

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