KABUL, Afghanistan -- The United States has been quietly reducing its troop strength in Afghanistan despite the lack of a peace deal with the Taliban, at a time when President Donald Trump has expressed reluctance to remain engaged in costly wars abroad.
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin Miller, said Monday that the size of the force in the country had dropped by 2,000 over the past year, down to somewhere between 12,000 and 13,000.
American negotiators had tried to use troop reductions as a bargaining chip in their long peace talks with the Taliban, hoping to get some concessions from the insurgent group. Trump abruptly aborted those talks last month, citing the Taliban's continued attacks, including one that killed a U.S. soldier.
The disclosure that the United States has already been pulling back troops from Afghanistan, deal or no deal, came just after Trump stunned allies and adversaries alike by pulling American forces from parts of Syria.
In both cases, critics said Washington was giving up invaluable leverage in negotiations to shape the future of the two countries.
In peace talks with the Taliban aimed at ending the United States' longest war, American negotiators told the insurgents that Washington was truly committed to Afghanistan and that they should not try to wait out the Americans.
But Trump has repeatedly said he wants to pull the United States out of "endless wars."
The insurgents have been closely watching the events in Syria, where the Trump administration allowed Turkey to move against Kurdish fighters who had long been closely allied with U.S. forces.
"The U.S. follows its interests everywhere, and once it doesn't reach those interests, it leaves the area," Khairullah Khairkhwa, a senior Taliban negotiator, said in an interview posted on the group's website recently. "The best example of that is the abandoning of the Kurds in Syria. It's clear the Kabul administration will face the same fate."
Miller discussed the troop reductions on Monday at a news conference in Kabul.
Other American and Afghan officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the plan, said the eventual force size could drop to as low as 8,600 -- roughly the size of an initial reduction envisioned in a draft agreement with the Taliban before Trump halted the peace talks.
Rather than issuing a formal withdrawal order, they are reducing the force gradually by not replacing troops who cycle out.
A senior Afghan official said the government had signed off on the reduction. Officials would not discuss other details of the drawdown, including any specific timeline for it.
The confirmation of the troop reduction came as U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper was making a visit to Afghanistan. Earlier in his visit, Esper had seemed to allude to some potential reduction in U.S. forces, saying that drawing down to 8,600 troops would not affect important counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan.
For months, there has been debate within the Trump administration on meeting the president's goal of stopping what he has described as open-ended American military entanglements in foreign conflicts. Amid the president's growing frustration, diplomats negotiating a peace deal in Afghanistan dangled troop reductions before the Taliban, which has long demanded a complete U.S. troop withdrawal.
The decision to reduce American troops even without a deal could give the United States less leverage over the ultimate shape of an Afghan government. It is also likely to mean a significant shift away from the U.S. military's long-standing mission of training the Afghan military as American officials concentrate on counterterrorism operations, officials said.
American military officials, though wary of leaving Afghanistan altogether, had signed off on the first stages of a troop drawdown in the draft peace agreement, which called for 5,400 U.S. troops to leave the country over about five months. The measure was put forward to show the Taliban that the Americans would abide by the proposed deal in return for the insurgent group reducing violence in Afghanistan, according to officials taking part in the negotiations.
American officials have since quietly signaled that they are trying to keep the talks with the Taliban alive. Earlier this month, the chief negotiator for the United States, Zalmay Khalilzad, met informally with Taliban officials in Pakistan.
During Esper's visit to Afghanistan, he said a peace agreement was "the best way forward."
At the height of the war, in 2010 and 2011, more than 100,000 American troops were stationed in Afghanistan, aided by tens of thousands of soldiers from NATO allies in what made up one of the biggest military coalitions in the world.
A Section on 10/22/2019