US diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad said that "what the Taliban did harmed its cause and the prospects for normalization with it," but added that Washington should negotiate with it "to find out what happened, and why it happened?", suggesting that the Qatari government play a role in this matter.
It is known that this veteran diplomat, born in Afghanistan, was the one who oversaw the negotiations that led to the Doha agreement between Washington and the Taliban in 2020, and his statement came in response to the assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri this week in Kabul.
This statement was made in the midst of an analysis by The Washington Post that dealt with the circumstances of this assassination and discussed US-Afghan relations after this incident.
The newspaper said that the killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a drone strike last weekend is a "welcome" victory, as it came days before the passage of one year since the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan on August 31, 2021.
But the attack - which revealed Al-Zawahiri's presence in the heart of the Afghan capital, Kabul, which is controlled by the Taliban - introduced a new "worrisome" element in the tense administration of President Joe Biden's administration with Afghanistan in the era after the American intervention in that Central Asian country.
According to the analysis by the newspaper's editor, Missy Ryan, US officials believed that senior Taliban leaders were aware of Al-Zawahiri's presence in a villa in the Sherpur neighborhood of Kabul, and tried to conceal the attack after it occurred.
In a statement shortly after Biden announced the operation, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that by hosting and harboring the al-Qaeda leader, the Taliban had "blatantly" violated the Doha agreement and its repeated assurances to the world that it would not allow "terrorists" to use Afghan soil to threaten the security of other countries.
The Taliban responded "angrily" to the incident, calling the air strike a "violation of international norms" and saying it was the United States that had violated the Doha agreement.
A day after Biden announced Zawahiri's death, US officials said they were investigating the impact of the Taliban's acceptance of his hosting on issues including US aid to Afghanistan, the release of billions of dollars from Afghan government reserves held in the United States, and possible steps toward normalizing relations with the Taliban.
And the Washington Post quoted in its report on Laurel Miller - who worked as a senior official in Afghanistan in the administrations of former US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump - that Al-Zawahiri's presence in Kabul confirms the US government's old assessment of the Taliban's relations with Al-Qaeda, and also confirms the prevailing impression that the movement supports "terrorism", which would make the normalization of relations with Kabul more dangerous "politically" for the Biden administration.
And many analysts believe - according to the newspaper - that such normalization is necessary to make Afghanistan a sustainable country in the long term.
The newspaper considered the news of Al-Zawahiri's death "the culmination" of a year in which the Biden administration took small steps to expand its dealings with the Taliban, the movement it has been fighting on the battlefields for 20 years.
That included dealings in support of the resumption of some aid payments, which previously accounted for up to 80% of Afghan government spending, but were largely frozen after Taliban militants ousted the elected government in August 2021.
The writer concludes her analysis - with what Laurel Miller said - that "unless the United States decides that it will completely turn its back on the Afghan people, which it does not seem to want to do, it has - really - no other option than to deal with the Taliban on some level, because the Taliban is Who controls Afghanistan?