The Taliban Kicked the U.S. Out of Afghanistan. Now They Want It Back.Five years after driving the United States out of Afghanistan, the Taliban are inviting it to come back — with diplomats and cash, but no military.
“We consider the chapter of war to have come to an end, and from now on, we want relations based on mutual respect and a new chapter of positive engagement,” Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, said in an interview with The New York Times in Kabul.
Mr. Muttaqi said the United States could “reopen its embassy, maintain a diplomatic presence and invest” in Afghanistan’s vast mineral wealth, dams and roads — projects that three U.S. administrations and their allies spent billions trying to develop, and that the Taliban insurgency spent two decades trying to dismantle.
The public overture, the first by such a high-ranking Taliban official in years, is the Afghan government’s latest push in a long effort to extract the country from isolation, with mixed results.
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