President Trump Says US Forces In Afghanistan To Be Slashed To Fewer Than 5,000 This Year

Stars and Stripes: Trump says US forces in Afghanistan to be slashed to fewer than 5,000 this year

President Donald Trump said he expects fewer than 5,000 U.S. troops to be in Afghanistan by November and called America’s wars in the Middle East the “biggest mistake” in the country’s history during a television interview this week.

“We’re largely out of Afghanistan,” Trump said in an interview with Axios aired on HBO Monday. “It’s already planned. … We’ll be down in a very short period of time to 8,000, then we’re gonna be down to 4,000. We’re negotiating right now, we’ve been there for 19 years — 19 years — we’ll be getting out.”

The U.S. has already withdrawn about a third of its troops, bringing the number to about 8,500, following a peace agreement signed with the Taliban in February that also calls for a full withdrawal by next summer if certain conditions are met, including the Taliban’s breaking of its ties with al-Qaida.

The current troop numbers are about what they were when Trump took office in 2017, before numbers ramped up again to about 14,000 under a strategy meant to pressure the militants into peace negotiations.

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WNU Editor: The original hope was that there will be zero US forces in Afghanistan by now. Now we are looking at 2021 as the final year (maybe).

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