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Dec. 20, 2018 / 10:40 PM GMT/ UpdatedDec. 21, 2018 / 12:50 PM GMT

By Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee and Josh Lederman

The White House has ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, two defense officials and a person briefed on the matter told NBC News.

The plans are due shortly after the new year, according to the officials. They cautioned that no decision has been made, but President Donald Trump wants to see options.

The White House has asked the Pentagon to look into multiple options, including a complete withdrawal, the officials said.

An Afghan official told NBC News that Trump is considering a substantial drawdown of U.S. troops in the country.

The Pentagon did not return a request for comment.

The officials described the Afghanistan request a day after the Trump administration said it was pulling all U.S. forces out of Syria.

The U.S. has approximately 14,000 troops in Afghanistan. Trump has repeatedly expressed his impatience with the 17-year-old war.

NBC News reported in July that Trump's stance prompted U.S. diplomats and commanders to gamble on a bid to kick-start peace negotiations, including holding direct talks with the Taliban.

The U.S. special peace envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been reaching out to top Taliban leaders in a bid to launch peace negotiations to end the war before Trump decided to order U.S. troops out of the country, two foreign diplomats told NBC News in late November.

The Trump administration has also sought to force the Taliban to the negotiating table with a massive bombing campaign. The number of U.S. bombs dropped on Afghanistan hit a record high in 2018, with more than 5,200 as of September 30.

Courtney Kube is a national security and military reporter for NBC News.

Carol E. Lee is a national political reporter for NBC News.

Josh Lederman

Josh Lederman is a national political reporter for NBC News.

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Trump administration orders Pentagon to draw up Afghan troop ...

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Afghanistan: US military ordered to begin planning to ...

KABUL, Afghanistan Last year, when President Trump announced a new strategy 16 years into the Afghan war, many in Afghanistan saw it as a much-needed refocusing of the American commitment.

Conditions on the ground not arbitrary timetables will guide our strategy from now on, Mr. Trump said at the time. Americas enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out.

In the year since then, as the architects of that strategy have exited the administration one by one, many in Afghanistan came to believe that Mr. Trump who never met with his former top commander in the country had never really been persuaded, and that his impatience with the war was winning out.

On Friday, that suspicion seemed to be confirmed, as Afghan officials and Western diplomats woke to the unexpected news that Mr. Trump had ordered half of the 14,000 American troops in Afghanistan home, even as the war continues to rage and the Taliban threaten much of the country.

For many in the Afghan leadership, shock quickly turned to a sense of betrayal.

Most officials and diplomats said they would only speak on condition of anonymity because they were still assessing the situation. But many were less concerned about the reduction in troop numbers though struggling Afghan forces still need hands-on help than by the way news of it emerged, which they said appeared to undermine not only the Afghan government, but also some of the most senior American officials working for a peace deal.

Afghan officials said they had not been consulted or even warned about the drawdown. And the timing was likely to complicate the American push for peace talks with the Taliban, which requires maintaining pressure, or at least holding the line, on the battlefield.

Just this week, senior American diplomats had conducted two days of extensive talks with representatives of the insurgency, with the future of the United States military presence among the topics discussed. And hours before the troop pulldown became public knowledge, Zalmay Khalilzad, the most senior American diplomat involved in the talks, said he had made it clear to the Taliban that the American commitment was firm.

The decision also comes at a time when the American military already has a trust deficit with its Afghan partners after a spate of recent insider attacks. A feeling of abandonment could further increase the risk to soldiers working closely with Afghan partners.

Under the right circumstances, an American troop reduction could be a boon to peace talks a demonstration to the Taliban that the United States is willing to do what is necessary to reach a deal.

Its clear that a rapid pullout of all international forces could spark the collapse of the Afghan government and start a new civil war, said Graeme Smith, a consultant with the International Crisis Group and a longtime observer of Afghanistan. Still, this partial withdrawal could send a useful message to all sides. This signals to the Taliban that the U.S. is serious about negotiating an exit.

But the surprise nature of the move, coming before the Taliban had indicated any willingness to hold formal talks with Afghan officials or agree to a cease-fire, suggested it was unlikely to have been coordinated with the recent peace moves, and that it could in fact undermine the negotiators.

Afghan leaders who have met with Mr. Khalilzad about the talks said he expressed a sense of urgency, warning that Mr. Trump might take unilateral action if there were no breakthrough on peace talks.

But the officials said Mr. Khalilzad seemed to believe he had months to push for that breakthrough, and that he was unlikely to have known what was coming.

Publicly, President Ashraf Ghanis office played down the significance of the troop reduction, saying that the Afghan forces had weathered such storms before, notably the first drastic withdrawal of American troops in 2014.

If the few thousand foreign troops that advise, train and assist leave, it will not affect our security, Mr. Ghanis chief adviser, Fazel Fazly, said in a statement. In the past four and half years, our security is completely in the hands of Afghans, and the final goal is that Afghan national defense and security forces will stand on their feet to protect and defend our people and soil on their own.

In private, however, officials views ranged from a sense of betrayal to fear of outright chaos.

The Taliban clearly welcomed the news. A senior member of the insurgency said the drawdown was a sign that Mr. Trump realized negotiations were the only way to end the conflict.

In neighboring Pakistan, which the United States sees as crucial to ending the war because its military has long given sanctuary to Taliban leaders, officials said they, too, had been surprised by the announcement. They expressed concern about how it could affect the push for peace talks, and about whether a premature withdrawal could lead to the kind of chaos that followed the Soviet Unions pullout from Afghanistan in the late 1980s.

A senior Pakistani security official said the American withdrawal should be phased and should ensure that Afghanistans military and government can sustain themselves.

Much of the feeling of betrayal on the part of Afghan officials stems from the fact that they pinned significant hope on Mr. Trumps new strategy, staking political capital at home and risking anger in the region.

The strategy, announced as the Taliban were making a serious push for cities and other territory across the country, promised the Afghan government expanded resources, as well as pressure on Pakistans military to stop harboring Taliban leaders.

The Afghan government saw it as just the boost it needed in the face of panic. And for American generals and soldiers on the ground, it suggested a long-term commitment. Several Marines who had just returned to Helmand Province, once a site of bloody battles for them, said they now saw the war as a generational conflict one in which their children would probably serve.

Mohammad Radmanish, a retired Afghan general and defense analyst, said the drawdown would not make a big difference on the battlefield.

After 2014, they are here to support, train and advise the Afghan forces, Mr. Radmanish said of the Americans. It is the Afghan forces who are doing the fighting against the terrorists.

But officers who were still in the fight expressed serious concern.

If the forces leave here and leave us alone, it will be a dangerous blow and will have very negative consequences, said Maj. Mohammed Ali Ahmadi, the commander of the Afghan commando battalion in the northeast. We dont have the proper capabilities to defend the areas, particularly the areas where the security forces are under grave threat. It will not be fair to us.

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In Afghanistan, Alarm and a Sense of Betrayal Over U.S ...

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Officials brace for Afghanistan announcement - CNN Video

Two-day formal talks with the Taliban concluded in the United Arab Emirates this week. Billed as the most significant talks to date, they included representatives from the United States and the three countries considered to have influence over the Taliban: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

The Afghan Taliban have come to the negotiating table before as part of various bids to end the 17-year-long war that is the longest in American history, but this time was different. The group has always had two primary demands if it was going to agree to any peace settlement, and for the first time, significant steps were made towards meeting them.

Direct negotiations with the United States

First, the Taliban has always demanded that it be able to negotiate directly with the United States. Because the U.S. classed the Taliban as a terrorist group, it wouldn't negotiate with them, insisting that all dealing be done with Afghanistan's internationally recognized government. The Taliban considers the Afghan government an American puppet, established after it was ousted from power in Afghanistan by the U.S. in 2001, and refuses to deal with it.

The talks that ended Thursday, therefore, at which the American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad was present, were a major achievement for the Taliban, who had, again, reportedly refused to meet with the Afghan government delegation that had been sent to the UAE.

American withdrawal

The second major Taliban demand has been included in every statement released by the group for years. The group consistently calls on the United States to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and end its "occupation" of the country.

With the announced drawdown of American troops by the Trump administration, the Taliban have partly achieved this.

Mr. Trump's previous strategy, which was laid out nearly two years ago, had been welcomed by the Afghan government and military analysts. It involved not declaring an exit date for American troops from Afghanistan, and, in so doing, it avoided repeating what happened after the Obama administration's scheduled troop drawdown, before which the Taliban retreated and prepared. Their attacks increased after American troops left the country.

As well as encouraging economic activity, Mr. Trump's previous no-exit date strategy had also boosted the morale of Afghan soldiers, which was low, and the decision to withdraw half of them has been shocking to Afghan soldiers and civilians alike.

It is expected that a reduction in American troops on the ground in Afghanistan would lead to an increase in the number of airstrikes that are carried out targeting the Taliban and the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS). More airstrikes mean more civilian casualties. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) documented 649 casualties in the first nine months of 2018 that were the result of airstrikes carried out by either international or government forces.

In response to the news, the chief adviser to Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, Fazel Fazly, tweeted, "If the few thousand foreign troops that advise, train, & assist, leave it will not affect our security."

As for the Taliban's response, they have so far remained tight-lipped.

"We will react when the announcement (of troops withdrawal) is made formal," a spokesman for the group, Zabihullah Mujahid, told CBS News.

Read more:
Are the Taliban winning in Afghanistan? - CBS News