Trump says deal with Taliban is close

US to keep 8,600 troops in Afghanistan after deal with insurgents over 18-year war

WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States plans to withdraw more than 5,000 troops from Afghanistan and then will determine further drawdowns in the longest war in the country's history.

Trump's comment came as a US envoy is in his ninth round of talks with the Taliban to find a resolution to the nearly 18-year-old war. The US president, who campaigned on ending the war, said the US was "getting close" to making a deal, but that the outcome of the US-Taliban talks remained uncertain.

"Who knows if it's going to happen," Trump told Fox News Radio's The Brian Kilmeade Show.

Trump did not offer a timeline for withdrawing troops. The Pentagon has been developing plans to withdraw as many as half of the 14,000 US troops still there, but the Taliban wants all foreign forces withdrawn.

"We're going down to 8,600 (troops) and then we'll make a determination from there," Trump said, adding that the US is going to have a "high intelligence" presence in Afghanistan going forward.

Reducing the US troop level to 8,600 would bring the total down to about where it was when Trump took office in January 2017. According to the NATO/Resolute Support mission, the US had 9,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2016, during the Barack Obama administration, and 8,000 in 2017.

Trump has called Afghanistan - where the Taliban harbored members of the al-Qaida network responsible for the Sept 11, 2001, attacks - the "Harvard University of terror".

If terror groups ever attacked the US from Afghanistan again, "we will come back with a force like they've never seen before", Trump said. But he added: "I don't see that happening."

Al-Qaida extremists used Afghanistan as a base from which to plan the 9/11 attacks. A month later, US troops invaded Afghanistan, where they have remained ever since. More than 2,400 US service members have died in the conflict.

Persistent attacks

A Taliban spokesman also has said that they're close to a final agreement. But even as the talks go on, there are persistent attacks by the Taliban across Afghanistan, and an affiliate of the Islamic State group has taken root in the country and is expanding its base.

"Taliban and the IS are still potential threats for the national security of Afghanistan and the US. The Afghan government strongly believes that any reduction of US forces in Afghanistan will be based on conditions on the ground," Sediq Seddiqi, a spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, said in a statement.

A US State Department spokesman said US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and his team continued to make progress on Thursday in Doha, Qatar, toward an agreement with the Taliban. The spokesman was not authorized to publicly discuss the negotiations and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Even if Khalilzad is able to close a deal, it will remain for the Afghan government to try to negotiate its own agreement with the Taliban. Part of those talks would include determining a role for the Taliban in governing a country that it ruled before US forces invaded in October 2001. So far, the Taliban have refused to negotiate with the Afghan government, which it views as illegitimate and a puppet for the West.

On Wednesday at the Pentagon, the top US military officer said it was too early to talk about a full US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Pentagon reporters that any US deal with the Taliban will be based on security conditions on the ground and that Afghan forces aren't yet able to secure the country without help from allied forces.

On Friday, Taliban militants overran Chah Ab district and set on fire the district headquarters in northern Afghanistan's Takhar Province, provincial police spokesman Abdul Khalil Asir said.

"The Taliban rebels launched massive offensives on Chah Ab district in the early hours of Friday and set on fire the district headquarters," Asir said.

Agencies - Xinhua

(China Daily 08/31/2019 page8)