Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee at NBC News report:
The Trump administration intends to announce the drawdown of more than 4,000 troops from Afghanistan as early next week, according to three current and former U.S. officials. The withdrawal will leave between 8,000 and 9,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the officials said.
The announcement comes just days after Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad rejoined diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which had broken down in September. On Thursday Amb. Khalilzad said the U.S. was "taking a brief pause" in talks after a Wednesday attack near Bagram Airfield killed two Afghan civilians and wounded 70 more.
Trump is said to have told his advisers that he wants all U.S. troops out before the election next November.
Secretary of Defense Mike Esper asserts the lower level of troops will take place even if the Taliban refuses to negotiate further. He said that "[The commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Scott Miller] feels confident we can go down to a lower level without jeopardizing our ability to ensure that Afghanistan doesn't become a safe haven for terrorism.”
That’s a stretch given that about 45% of Afghanistan is under Taliban control or contested. But Khalilzad says the reduction in force is part of a move to bring the Taliban back to talks that fell apart in September. The ultimate objective: a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops and a ceasefire.
Getting out of Afghanistan is something that should have happened at the latest when Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden eight-and-a-half years ago. Of course, if the al Qaeda leader hadn’t been allowed to slip out of Afghanistan into Pakistan in December 2001, the whole U.S. operation there might have been over quickly. As a report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from majority staff stated in 2009:
The war had been conceived as a swift campaign with a single objective: defeat the Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda by capturing or killing bin Laden and other key leaders. A unique combination of airpower, Central Intelligence Agency and special operations forces teams and indigenous allies had swept the Taliban from power and ousted Al Qaeda from its safe haven while keeping American deaths to a minimum. [...]
The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan.
Had bin Laden been captured or killed then and there, the Afghanistan invasion and occupation might well have been avoided altogether or at least been reduced in scope long before the withdrawal that is now apparently—but not certainly—on the way. If the troops do completely pull out, it would end the longest U.S. war in history except the one with American Indians from 1788 to 1890, which is always ignored when such tallies are made.