KABUL - In a press release issued from the Presidential Palace on Friday, it was said that the large tranche of 650 detainees expected to be released from Bagram prison on order of President Hamid Karzai's Commission for Addressing Bagram Prisoner Cases would be put on hold and reassessed by officials.

The announcement came after the pressure mounted for Karzai and supporters of the goodwill strategy he has pushed with militants in the last year, looking to release captured members of the Taliban in hopes of softening the group up for peace talks.

According to the special Bagram Commission, the 650 prisoners that were expected to be released in the first weeks of the new year were selected simply because there was not enough evidence to legitimately detain them under Afghan law.

However, there has been blowback against this decision from the Afghan Parliament, the families of war victims and U.S. officials.

Some Afghan representatives have called into question the legality of the Commission's decision, saying that any sort of releases would need to be ordered by the courts, not a commission established by the President. The Commission for Addressing Bagram Prisoner Cases was created upon Karzai's order over 10 months ago.

In an exclusive interview with TOLOnews on Thursday, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham said that the release of the 650 prisoners could be dangerous to Afghans and Americans and the move could have a disastrous effect on relations between Kabul and Washington.

"What they are proposing is the violation of our agreement that we have with the Afghan government, and it undercuts an independent judiciary...these 88 should have their day in court, they should be judged by the Afghan legal system, and the Afghan people deserve to have their day in court, and to release these people by the actions of one man would be a giant step backwards," Graham said.

According to officials, 88 of the 650 planned on being released have been labeled "dangerous" and were detained on charges related to terrorist activities. This received a lot of backlash from commentators who see the releases as a strategy of appeasement that could put Afghan security at greater risk than it already is.

A number of stories have surfaced over the course of the year evidencing a trend of freed militants returning to the Taliban to only fight Afghan and coalition forces again rather than be a force for peace.

As of now, a total of 760 cases have been reviewed by the Bagram Commission, but the announcement on Friday is likely to slow the process down with greater oversight being used after the releases were thrown into the public spotlight this week.

Ultimately, there are many who simply don't believe a strategy of catch and release can work with the Taliban's fighters.

"Until the dogmatic ideas exist among our statesman and our institutions, no one can change the mindset of the imprisoned Taliban, because its his ideology," Afghan security analyst Hai Gul Sulaiman Khail said. (Tolo News)