This is popular front a podcast focus on the very niche and kind of geeky

details of Modern Warfare with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to military analyst Dr Jonathan Schroden and he's been covering Afghanistan

in this regard about as long as the war has been going on.

18 years, he's been doing this 16 years.

He knows what he's talking about.

And he's going to be speaking to us about this recent situation

in Afghanistan where the Taliban, the Afghan government and the US government have all come

around the table and have had some kind of agreement, some kind of deal.

It's not quite a peace process as is being described, it's quite tricky and Dr. Schroeder is going to explain

what's actually happened. You'll have to excuse me I'm ill I sound like death

but yeah please do consider supporting Popular Front at patreon.com slash Popular Front. Maybe you can explain exactly what is going on with this this deal you know some people have said oh right you know the Taliban have won the war now

the US are pulling out what exactly is the you know the proper idea of what's going on here.

Yeah so I mean I don't think either of those characterizations are entirely

accurate as you might imagine. So really the I think the biggest misconception about the agreement is that it's some

sort of peace deal and people have been talking about it like it's a peace deal and

using that term and in fact it's not it's not meant to be a peace deal it's not labeled as a peace deal that's really not

what it's about it's meant to create a pathway for the Afghans to start talking to each other,

what they've called intra-Afghan negotiations,

and all along the Taliban have maintained a set of free conditions for that to occur.

And the most significant of those was that the U.S. would agree to a withdrawal timeline

set of conditions, you know, and an end point to get all of its troops out of Afghanistan.

And once the US agreed to that, the Taliban have sort of steadfastly maintained for a number of years that they would then sit down and

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