Last week, the State Department said the White House has yet to make a decision on the US military's “force posture in Afghanistan after 1 May” which should see no American troops left in the country, in line with a Washington-Taliban peace deal.
There are now about 1,000 more US troops in Afghanistan than was officially disclosed, a number that stands at 3,500 instead of 2,500, The New York Times (NYT) cited unnamed officials as saying.
One of the insiders attributed “the cloudy accounting around troop numbers” to the deployment of “some temporary and transitioning units” as well as some Special Operations forces having been taken “off the books”.
Pentagon spokesman Rob Lodewick, however, has been cited by the NYT as claiming that the US military is “still at 2,500” in Afghanistan, a statement that followed a State Department spokeswoman saying last week that all options for the 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan “remain on the table”.
The spokeswoman added that the US has not yet made any decisions about its “force posture in Afghanistan after 1 May”, when the withdrawal of the remaining American troops from the country is due to be completed.
‘All Options on the Table' for US Troops in Afghanistan, State Department Says
This came shortly after Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly pointed out in a letter to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that the White House is “considering the full withdrawal of [US] forces [from Afghanistan] by May 1st…
