US is quietly reducing its troop force in Afghanistan

The current process of troop reduction outside of peace talks gives more control over the process to Miller and the government of President Ashraf Ghani, which had criticised the United States for negotiating a troop withdrawal with the insurgents rather than with the country’s elected government.

>> Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Mujib MashalThe New York Times
Published : 21 Oct 2019, 11:31 AM
Updated : 21 Oct 2019, 11:31 AM

In January 2018, Ghani, perceiving that Trump urgently wanted to cut costs in Afghanistan, said he would be happy to directly negotiate some degree of troop reductions with the Americans if it would avoid rushing into a bad deal with Taliban.

Miller had long set out a goal of an 8,600-member troop force as being both a desired level and as the minimum needed to support the Afghan military, according to two defence officials.

Miller, a Special Operations officer by trade, has a reputation for whittling down military units and commands to “trim the fat” and best accomplish their mission. In the last year that he has led the Afghan mission, US troops have focused on seeking out proactive leadership for Afghan forces who can better carry the burden of the war, while the United States can focus its resources in backing them up with air power.

At the height of the war, in 2010 and 2011, there were more than 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan, aided by tens of thousands of NATO allies in what made up one of the biggest military coalitions in the world.

Now, a further reduction in US forces would mean that the burden of training the Afghan military would fall more heavily on the roughly 8,500 NATO forces and other allies in the country.

It is unclear, however, whether a reduction in US forces might lead to some reconsideration by NATO allies as well. In a recent interview with The New York Times, NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, would not speculate on any reduction of troops, but added that NATO remains committed to the mission in Afghanistan.

“We have adjusted that many times, and we will always assess exactly the way and the composition of our forces in Afghanistan,” Stoltenberg said.

The plan to shrink the force in Afghanistan comes as much of the world’s attention has been focused on the retreat of US forces from the front line in Syria as Turkish-backed troops advance into the country. And in many ways, the changes in Syria and Afghanistan are linked.

In December, on the heels of Trump’s first announcement that US forces would be leaving Syria, he also demanded the withdrawal of 7,000 troops from Afghanistan. Trump’s orders sent the Pentagon and the US command in the Middle East scrambling in an effort to persuade Trump otherwise, officials say.

It was clear that the Taliban, too, have been closely watching the events in Syria, where the Trump administration allowed Turkey to move against Kurdish fighters who had long been closely allied with US forces.

“The US follows its interests everywhere, and once it doesn’t reach those interests, it leaves the area. The best example of that is the abandoning of the Kurds in Syria,” Khairullah Khairkhawa, one of the Taliban’s senior negotiators, was quoted as saying in an interview posted on the insurgent group’s website recently. “It’s clear the Kabul administration will face the same fate.”

© 2019 New York Times News Service