4/28/2023 0 Comments Troop drawdown in afghanistan![]() ![]() The Pentagon referred all requests for comment on Afghanistan drawdown plans to the White House. His national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, had said shortly before Trump tweeted that troop numbers would be brought down to 2,500 early next year.Ībout 4,500 troops are currently on the ground in Afghanistan, reduced from over 12,000 when the deal was signed in February. It was the latest in a long line of ad hoc policy announcements from Trump that have caught his own advisers and military by surprise. The White House doubled down on the message on Thursday morning: “our troops in Afghanistan are coming home by the end of the year”, the official Twitter account for the administration said. Trump’s plans were announced in a tweet late on Wednesday night. Some critics of the Doha talks argue that the militants are merely marking time until the departure of US troops. The US-Taliban deal laid out a full departure of American forces by May 2021 but only if conditions on counter-terrorism were met, including severing ties with al-Qaida. The peace talks were set up under a withdrawal agreement signed earlier this year between the Taliban and Trump’s administration. ![]() The Afghan government and Taliban negotiators are currently attempting to hammer out a new political settlement for the country in the Qatari capital. In most cases the Pentagon has sought to mitigate and slow the speed of the pullout but in some case the president has prevailed in bringing soldiers back home. He also has a record of ordering abrupt and total troop withdrawals from foreign deployments. Trump has made impulsive policy announcements about Afghanistan on Twitter before, including calling off a US-Taliban summit last year, shortly before a withdrawal agreement was first expected to be signed. “We could make some superficial show of pulling out uniformed troops, but obviously we still have a very massive contractor presence, and we would need a uniformed headquarters to oversee the shutdown and withdrawal of everything we have in country.” It’s simply can’t happen,” said Jason Dempsey, a former infantry officer who served in Afghanistan. Without the prospect of US military pressure, the Taliban would have little incentive to stay at the negotiating table with representatives of the Kabul government.įrom a practical point of view, disentangling a 19-year military presence would take considerably longer than two months.
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