US-Taliban Talks without Afghan Gov’t Was a Mistake: Crocker

Speaking during an interview with Fox News on Saturday, Mr. Crocker said that his country has delegitimized the Afghan government that it has supported during the last 18 years.
He believes that Washington should return to a different political process where the Afghan government should be a key player in the talks with the Taliban.
“We’ll need to return to some kind of political process but it will have to be on a very different basis, it will have to have the Afghan government up front,” Crocker said, “If the Taliban won’t deal with that then we are just going to have to wait until they are ready to deal.”
The former U.S. official reasons that the Afghan government controls provincial capitals of all 34 provinces in Afghanistan while Taliban controls none.
“There are 34 provinces in Afghanistan. Do you know how many of those provincial capitals the Taliban control? It’s a nice round number: It’s zero,” he said.
Crocker remembered the 9/11 attack, saying we do not want to hand Afghanistan back to the people who gave Americans the worst disaster they have seen in their entire history.