MONITORING (SW) – U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley has said Washington would keep two larger bases in Afghanistan despite approving the drawdown plans.
According to a report by the Reuters, President Donald Trump’s post-election decision last month to cut nearly half of the roughly 4,500 troops currently in Afghanistan came before military leaders could devise plans to execute a drawdown, leaving many questions unanswered about the future U.S. military mission after Trump leaves office on Jan. 20.
Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered the first details about the drawdown at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution think tank. He said that in addition to the two larger bases, the United States would also keep “several satellite bases.”
He said the U.S. military will also continue its two core missions: aiding Afghan security forces who are locked in a grinding conflict with Taliban insurgents and carrying out counterterrorism operations against Islamic State and al Qaeda militants.
However, Milley did not disclose which bases in Afghanistan would be shuttered or say what capabilities would be lost as the United States removes 2,000 troops from the country. He declined to speculate about what President-elect Joe Biden may decide.
“What comes after that, that will be up to a new administration,” Milley said.
The Taliban were ousted from power in 2001 by U.S.-led forces for refusing to hand over al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. A U.S.-backed government has held power in Afghanistan since then, although the Taliban have control over wide areas of the country, the report added.
The CNN reported last month that, a series of sweeping changes at the Pentagon that started with the firing of Defense Secretary of Mark Esper saw Trump loyalists installed in influential positions. Knowledgeable sources told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the White House-directed purge at the Defense Department may have been motivated by the fact that Esper and his team were pushing back on a premature withdrawal from Afghanistan, which would be carried out before the required conditions on the ground were met.
The senior defense official claimed that “there is no reduction in capability” as a result of the drawdown, calling the reduction a “collaborative” decision while refusing to address a recent Pentagon memo that said conditions on the ground in Afghanistan did not warrant additional draw-downs.
Prior to his firing, Esper sent a classified memo to the White House asserting that it was the unanimous recommendation of the chain of command that the US not draw down its troop presence in Afghanistan any further until conditions were met, sources familiar with the memo tell CNN.
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