“We’re going down to 8,600 [troops] and then we’ll make a determination from there as to what happens,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News on Thursday.
By RACHEL WOLFUS President Donald Trump(photo credit: REUTERS)
After reports of an emerging deal between the US and the Taliban, President Donald Trump discussed plans to reduce US military presence in Afghanistan.“We’re going down to 8,600 [troops] and then we’ll make a determination from there as to what happens,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News on Thursday. In the Fox News interview, Trump called Afghanistan “the Harvard University of Terror,” and said that people “were trained and then they did the World Trade Center attack."We're going to keep a presence there. We're reducing that presence very substantially and we're going to always have a presence. We're going to have high intelligence."The US invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, making it the longest war in US history. During his campaign, Trump was clear that he wanted to end US presence in Afghanistan.This week, Marine Corps General Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said “I’m not using the ‘withdraw’ word right now. It’s our judgment that the Afghans need support to deal with the level of violence in the country today,” Fox News reported.Senator Lindsey Graham also commented on the president's plans in a Washington Post op-ed on Wednesday that he co-wrote with Jack Keane. "We may be in such a rush to remove our forces that we find ourselves on the cusp of a strategic blunder. Any deal that calls for withdrawing our forces completely from Afghanistan is a bad deal for the United States."
