Amrullah Saleh, the former First Vice President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, has claimed that the peace process with the Taliban was, in fact, designed to weaken and ultimately bring down the republican system.
In recent remarks, Saleh said that after 2018, promises by the United States and Western countries regarding visas and the evacuation of individuals, along with the Doha process and extensive media campaigns, created an environment that changed perceptions within the republic regarding political compromise.
He said: “The peace process was a fabricated name for regime change.”
Saleh claims that, throughout this process, he and President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani were portrayed as obstacles to peace in order to create the perception that the price of reaching an agreement with the Taliban had to be paid through the sacrifice of the republic’s leaders.
He also criticized certain media outlets, accusing them of conducting propaganda against the republic and downplaying the Taliban’s responsibility for attacks and urban terrorism.
Saleh further claimed that, over the past five years, the Taliban had received $17 billion in international aid. In his view, if a portion of those funds had instead been used to strengthen efforts against the Taliban, the collapse of the republic and the subsequent exodus of Afghans from the country could have been avoided.
He said that the narrative that the republic collapsed because of corruption was subsequently presented as a justification for the process. According to Saleh, there had been opportunities to reform the system and establish a power-sharing arrangement, but the primary objective was not reforming the system; rather, it was “handing Afghanistan over to the Taliban.”
Saleh added that he would provide further details in the future about other aspects of the process and what he described as its alleged underlying objective of handing Afghanistan over to the Taliban.
Writer:Saeed Sameer
