President Trump announced via Twitter a sharply accelerated schedule for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the 19-year conflict in Afghanistan by Christmas, even as peace talks with the Taliban have barely gotten off the ground and Pentagon officials scrambled in the face of the surprise new timeline.
Mr. Trump has made no secret of his desire to end the U.S. mission in the “endless” conflict in Afghanistan, and a deal with the Taliban early this year outlined a schedule for a string of drawdowns leading to a full pullout by mid-2021.
The schedule was also supposed to be conditioned on a reduction in violence by the Taliban against the U.S.-backed government and a promise by the insurgents not to work with terror groups such as al Qaeda and Islamic State.
But Mr. Trump announced on Twitter on Wednesday night that “we should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas.”
The announcement came as Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper was out of the country, much of the top brass at the Pentagon was quarantining after possible exposure to COVID-19, and the power-sharing talks between the warring Afghan factions were just getting underway.
Pentagon officials had no comment Thursday about the Christmas deadline, referring all questions to the White House. A top Pentagon official for the region told a House hearing three weeks ago that the U.S. would still have as many as 5,000 troops in Afghanistan at the end of November, with further reductions dictated by conditions on the ground.
A Taliban spokesman, however, immediately welcomed Mr. Trump’s tweet and called it a positive step toward reaching a peace deal.
The Taliban “is also committed to the contents of the agreement and hopes for good and positive relations with all countries, including the U.S., in the future,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement.
Private analysts were uncertain how seriously to take Mr. Trump’s revelation.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the president’s message shows that a deal hammered out between the Taliban and the U.S. is more about securing an American military withdrawal rather than a lasting peace or the security of the U.S.-allied government of President Ashraf Ghani.
“U.S. credibility with allies everywhere and (counter-terrorism) efforts are being sacrificed for a timetable driven by politics, not conditions on the ground,” Mr. Haass said in his own Twitter statement.
But James Carafano, a security analyst with The Heritage Foundation and retired Army officer, said all sides needed to calm down and not take Mr. Trump’s missive as a shift in American policy.
“The president often tweets, ’This is what I would like to happen,’” Mr. Carafano said Thursday. “Rather than trying to interpret the president’s tweets like they’re goat bones in a mud hut, we should wait and see what policies actually unfold on the ground.”
When the president said American troops “should” be out of Afghanistan by Christmas, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s repudiating the policy of his own administration, Mr. Carafano said. The same day Mr. Trump released the tweet, his national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, was telling an audience in Las Vegas that the U.S. troop levels will be cut to 2,500 early next year.
That’s still a major step toward fulfilling Mr. Trump’s campaign promise — there were more than 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the start of 2020.
“He also wants to get the troops out of Syria. We’re four years into it and they’re all still there,” Mr. Carafano said. “This administration reduces forces based on the facts on the ground as opposed to a calendar.”
But Mr. Trump’s obvious desire to pull American forces out could undercut U.S. security interests, said Bradley Bowman, an Afghanistan War veteran who now heads up the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
American and allied troops, working with Afghan security forces, are preventing the country from becoming another launch pad for terrorist attacks against the U.S., Mr. Bowman said, as happened with the Sept. 11 attacks.
“If we relieve pressure on terrorists there, they will have the time and space to plot and launch attacks against us,” he said.
He said Mr. Trump risks repeating the mistake of President Obama in agreeing to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq prematurely in 2011, a move critics say created the security vacuum that gave rise to the Islamic State.
“President Trump is about to make a similar mistake in Afghanistan and American national security will be among the leading victims,” Mr. Bowman said.
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.
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