Trump Contradicts Military on Afghan Withdrawal Date as Taliban Gets Belligerent

President Trump visiting US troops in Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan alongside Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, November 2019 (Official White House Photograph by Shealah Craighead).

President Trump tweeted on October 7 that he wanted all remaining U.S. troops pulled from Afghanistan by the year’s end. Trump’s statement contradicts the position of his National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, who outlined a troop reduction to 2,500 by early 2021. The comment comes as the Taliban and Afghan government conduct peace talks, though violence continues to ravage the war-torn country. 

O’Brien had told an audience on Wednesday that “as of today, there are under 5,000 and that will go to 2,500 by early next year.” Trump’s tweet, however, seems to upend the military’s troop withdrawal plan. U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity to the Associated Press said that they had not discussed a revised withdrawal plan before Trump’s comment, nor had they received any orders to speed up the ongoing withdrawal efforts. 

Trump’s Wednesday evening tweet expresses his desire to have all U.S. troops home by Christmas, a date he reaffirmed on Thursday during a Fox Business Channel interview. This alarmed senior national security officials, who fear a repeat of his 2018 that triggered an abrupt removal from Syria. 

Previously, American officials have stressed that the withdrawal should consider conditions on the ground, as outlined in a peace deal between the United States and the Taliban. In a September interview, General Frank McKenzie of U.S. Central Command said that Taliban forces “continued to attack government security forces at a fairly high rate. And that's very concerning.” 

This latest announcement comes just one day after historic peace negotiations between the Afghan government and representatives of the Taliban began in Doha, Qatar. The talks follow months of diplomatic efforts by the United States, resulting in a series of prisoner releases that aimed to establish mutual trust. For their part, Taliban officials lauded Trump’s announcement as a “positive step,” while Abdullah Abdullah, head of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation, said such a withdrawal would be “premature.”

Even as U.S. officials attempt to understand the implications of this new timeline, violence continues to escalate in Afghanistan. On Friday, Taliban forces launched a large-scale offensive in the city of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, Afghanistan’s largest province. Insurgents overwhelmed a number of security checkpoints surrounding the city and took control of a major access road. The U.S. responded with several airstrikes in support of the Afghan government. 

The Taliban’s previous behavior suggests that they plan to leverage violence as a tool in negotiations. According to the Afghan Defense Ministry, the Taliban have carried out attacks in 20 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces in less than 24 hours. 

As the troop withdrawal process continues, these latest offensives show the inability for the United States to bring 19 years of continuous war to a close and calls into question the viability of Afghanistan’s political future and the United States’ regional presence.