Former president Hamid Kar-zai in a media interview said ex-president Ashraf Ghani’s fleeing from the country ruined a last-minute deal which was meant to transfer the power from Ghani to a power-sharing government.
A day before the Kabul col-lapse, Karzai said, he and Abdullah Abdullah, the former chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation, had met with Ghani and agreed to leave Kabul for Doha the next day with 15 other politicians to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with the Taliban leaders in the Qa-tari capital.
Karzai said that on August 15 rumors had spread in the city that the Taliban was entering the city. The Taliban had al-ready arrived at the gates of Kabul.
He communicated with Doha, and the Taliban leaders said that no forces will enter the city before an agreement is reached, adding that secu-rity forces should remain in their positions.
“The government should stay in its positions and should not move, that they have no inten-tion to enter the city and, I and others spoke to various offi-cials and assurances were given to us that, yes, that was the case, that the Americans and the government forces were holding firm to the places (and) that Kabul would not fall,” Karzai said.
According to Karzai, in the af-ternoon when Ghani left Ka-bul, all the security forces, in-cluding the Kabul police chief, had gone.
