Afghanistan’s President on Sunday said he would not free thousands of Taliban prisoners ahead of all-Afghan power-sharing talks set for next week, publicly disagreeing with a timetable for a speedy prisoner release laid out just a day earlier in a US-Taliban peace agreement.

President Ashraf Ghani’s comments pointed to the first hitch in implementing the fragile deal, which is aimed at ending America’s longest war after more than 18 years and getting rival Afghan factions to agree on the future.

Still, the US has said a planned American troop withdrawal over the next 14 months is linked to the Taliban’s counter-terrorism performance, not to progress in intra-Afghan talks.

“The government of Afghanistan has made no commitment to free 5,000 Taliban prisoners,” Ghani told reporters in Kabul, a day after the deal was signed in Qatar.

“The request has been made by the United States for the release of prisoners and it can be part of the negotiations, but it cannot be a precondition,” he added. On the issue of the prisoner swap, Ghani said: “It is not in the authority of United States to decide, they are only a facilitator.”

He told CNN on Sunday that US President Donald Trump had not asked for the release of the prisoners and that the issue of prisoner releases should be discussed as part of a comprehensive peace deal.

“The political consensus... that would be needed for such a major step does not exist today,” Ghani said.

Ghani said key issues needed to be discussed first, including the Taliban’s ties with Pakistan and other countries that had offered it sanctuary, its ties with what he called terrorist groups and drug cartels, and the place of Afghan security forces and its civil administration.

“The people of Afghanistan need to believe that we’ve gone from war to peace, and not that the agreement will be either a Trojan horse or the beginning of a much worse phase of conflict,” Ghani added.

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told the CBS’s Face the Nation programme there had been prisoner releases from both sides in the past. “It’s going to be rocky and bumpy. No one is under any false illusion that this won’t be a difficult conversation,” he said.