Darrell Castle talks about the agreement for the withdrawal of American troops, signed February 29th, 2020, between the Trump Administration and officials representing the Taliban fighters of Afghanistan. Transcription/Notes AFGHANISTAN EXIT Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday March 6, 2020, and on today’s Report I will be talking about the agreement, signed February 29, 2020, between the Trump Administration and officials representing the Taliban. A better name for this Report “Afghanistan Exit” might be “Gimme Three Steps”, like the old song by Lynyrd Skynyrd but that wouldn’t help me on Google. It would probably be incorrect to call this a peace deal since it is a deal which simply allows the U.S. to leave Afghanistan. Peace? Well, maybe there will be peace after U.S. troops leave but, if so, that would be an interruption of the last 200 years or so in that country. Afghanistan has been continually at war, nonstop for 40 years, and that’s two generations without a single break. Nevertheless, after 19 years of U.S. involvement in the war I certainly welcome the deal that would bring U.S. participation to an end. I wonder if any of you folks have ever been involved in a business deal whereby you were trying to sell an asset, which you absolutely had to sell by a certain date. Your opposite in the deal knows you must sell so the offer will never be what would otherwise constitute a fair price. The buyer, in other words, knows you must sell and will take advantage of your weakness. That is the U.S. position in Afghanistan, especially with the release of the Afghanistan papers in December, which we talked about, and with this being a presidential election year. So, the United States signed a deal last Saturday that purports to end the U.S. presence in Afghanistan after almost two decades of U.S. participation in the war. The agreement has a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops that starts with the current number of 13,000 and reduces that to 8,600 within 135 days. The entire 13,000 must be out within 14 months. The deal has taken more than a year to complete, with U.S. and Taliban officials periodically starting and stopping negotiations for one reason or another. It was apparently negotiated and drafted from the U.S. side by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was present at the signing but did not sign it. Signing for the U.S. was Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Zalmay Khalizad, and for the Taliban, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. If the agreement were to be complied with, then all U.S. troops would eventually be coming home. President Trump hailed the deal as the fulfillment of his promise to get the U.S. out of endless no-win wars. He spoke directly with the Taliban leader by phone, the first American President to do so. Let’s look at the terms of agreement, but first, the costs of war after 19 years. You probably remember the early days after 9/11, when there were basically two forces in a civil war in Afghanistan—the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, with the Taliban’s harsh version of Sharia Law running the country. The U.S. chose to enter the war on the side of the Northern Alliance, which meant war with the Taliban. The Taliban was essentially the same group which fought the Russians from 1979 to 1989 with US aid. The Russians suffered 15,000 dead before they finally withdrew. The cost for the U.S. to this point has been over 2,400 dead and over 20,000 wounded. NATO and non-NATO allied nations have suffered 1,100 dead and 8,000 wounded. The Department of Defense (D.O.D) estimates the financial cost of the war at $737 billion, but the New York Times Sunday March 1st edition lists it at $2 Trillion. That is the more accurate figure, if you have been following this war all along. It was, and is, easy to see the figures add up far beyond what D.O.D. says. For the people of Afghanistan, the costs have indeed been high as well. More than 130,