In late December, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration allegedly ordered the US military to start withdrawing its 7,000 troops from Afghanistan. Right now, a total of 14,000 American servicemen are stationed in this South Asian country.
President Donald Trump is yet to make a final decision on the possible withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, The Washington Post quoted two senior White House officials as saying.
“Trump still wants to remove troops from Afghanistan — eventually all of them — but the current withdrawal probably will be far fewer than 7,000,” the officials pointed out.
Afghanistan Strategy: ‘Trump is in a Position Where He Can't Defy US Military'
They also said that military advisers managed to convince Trump that “a smaller and slower withdrawal is best for now”, adding that the US president may order a full exit “at any moment”.
“Trust me, he's heard every single argument on Afghanistan he could hear,” one of the officials noted. He added that Trump bemoans the fact that many of his advisers want him to stay in “all these wars forever”.
Other officials familiar with the plan were cited by the Washington Post as saying that the number of the US troops to be pulled out could be about half of what Trump was initially seeking. The officials later declined to elaborate.
NATO Welcomes Trump's ‘Conditions-Based' Afghanistan Strategy — Stoltenberg
In this context, the newspaper also referred…
