Trump Wants to Pull All U.S. Troops out of Afghanistan by the 2020 Election

NBC News is reporting that Donald Trump has told White House aides that he wants to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the 2020 election.

Current negotiations with the Taliban may make that possible. The two sides appear to be inching closer to a political deal that would include a total withdrawal of all U.S. forces.

But the NBC report alludes to some serious friction between the State Department and the Pentagon over the timing of the withdrawal. “It’s tense,” said one former official briefed on the debate:

Last December Trump threatened not only to immediately withdraw all troops from Afghanistan but also to shut down the U.S. embassy in Kabul, complaining to aides that it is too large and expensive, according to officials. The president’s threat to close the U.S. embassy — which has not been previously reported — so alarmed administration and military officials that they quickly offered him a plan to move up the timing of efforts to scale back the size of the embassy staff, officials said. . .

But Trump argued that without a military presence U.S. embassy staff could be in danger, so it should be closed, the officials said. He also said it was time for the U.S. to get out of the war there otherwise it could bankrupt the U.S. like it did Russia in the 1980s, the two former defense officials said.

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