Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said on Monday during a visit to Kabul, Afghanistan that President Trump is planning a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.
Graham told reporters that Trump will announce the withdrawal this week, and troops may begin to return home by the end of this year. There are currently 12,000 American troops in Afghanistan, which according to Graham the President will reduce to 8,600.
The U.S. has been trying to negotiate a peace deal with Taliban insurgents that would allow American forces to leave the country. However, negotiations have frequently broken off due to Taliban attacks on U.S. forces.
In September Trump ended peace negotiations after Taliban fighters killed an American servicemember, cancelling a proposed secret meeting between himself and Taliban leaders at Camp David. The U.S. and the Taliban completed a prisoner swap in November that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said might “facilitate direct peace negotiations” between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
Negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban resumed last week, but were almost immediately halted after an attack outside Bagram Air Base that left two Afghans dead and 70 wounded, including five U.S. soldiers.
Graham told reporters that the Taliban must keep its promises during negotiations if peace is to be advanced. The Senator also said he believed the Afghanistan National Security Forces are ready and able to hold the peace if American troops withdraw.
The proposed partial drawdown follows the publication by the Washington Post of the so-called “Afghanistan Papers,” a trove of documents that revealed U.S. officials repeatedly misled the public about the progress of the war in Afghanistan.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” commented three-star army general Douglas Lute, who advised the Bush and Obama administrations on Afghanistan and Iraq, to investigators of the war effort. “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
An unidentified U.S. soldier said recruits for the newly formed Afghan army were “awful — the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel.”