A. The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will take the following measures in the first one hundred thirty-five (135) days:
1) They will reduce the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to eight thousand six hundred (8,600) and proportionally bring reduction in the number of its allies and Coalition forces.
2) The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will withdraw all their forces from five (5) military bases.
We're going to pull down our numbers to the level Obama left them at within 135 days and abandon 5 military bases. But before we finish doing that, we are going to give them back 5,000 fighters in the first 9 days of this agreement?!
Up to five thousand (5,000) prisoners of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and up to one thousand (1,000) prisoners of the other side will be released by March 10, 2020,
That's very nice of us to "agree to" in our negotiation with this non-government. (Whatever happened to "we don't negotiate with terrorists?!")
But do we have the authority to do that? Sure, we can agree to pull out our own troops, but this is not solely ours to control, I would think.
March 10, 2020, the first day of intra-Afghan negotiations
We have now declared that the government of Afghanistan
will enter into these negotiations on a specific day. And, as it turns out, with a specific pre-determined outcome:
the new post-settlement Afghan Islamic government as determined by the intra-Afghan dialogue and negotiations
The agreement notes that the United States will "request the recognition and endorsement of the United Nations Security Council for this agreement." It says nothing about our going to "request the recognition and endorsement" of the government of Afghanistan for this agreement.
Gee, I wonder how they feel about this bi-lateral, exclusionary agreement in which they had
no hand.