..."Although almost exactly a year ago the United States entered with some fanfare into a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban, peace talks between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban have so far yielded few substantive results," the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction's 50th quarterly report to Congress noted just last week. "There has been no cease-fire agreement and high levels of insurgent and extremist violence continued in Afghanistan this quarter despite repeated pleas from senior U.S. and international officials to reduce violence in an effort to advance the peace process."

As a result, a NATO official told Reuters that "conditions have not been met. And with the new U.S. administration, there will be tweaks in the policy, the sense of hasty withdrawal which was prevalent will be addressed and we could see a much more calculated exit strategy."

The Biden administration had earlier promised "to review the February 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement" negotiated by the Trump administration with an eye to halting or reversing the Trump administration's draw-down of troops to the lowest levels since the 2001 invasion. The new president will "assess whether the Taliban was living up to its commitments to cut ties with terrorist groups, to reduce violence in Afghanistan, and to engage in meaningful negotiations with the Afghan government and other stakeholders."

The Department of Defense appears to have already made a decision.

"The Taliban have not met their commitments," Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby announced on January 28. "Without them meeting our commitments to renounce terrorism and to stop the violent attacks on the Afghan National security forces and by dint of that the Afghan people, it's very hard to see a specific way forward for the negotiated settlement." ...