Joe Biden, the President of the United States, has announced that all American troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan later this year.
According to the White House, withdrawal of troops will begin next month and will be completed by 11 September, the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC, which triggered the ‘War on Terror,’ and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The number of American troops in Afghanistan reached 100 000 during the presidency of Barack Obama, under whom Joe Biden served as Vice-President. Numbers were substantially reduced in Obama’s second term and this continued under his successor and Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump.
There are currently 2 500 American troops in Afghanistan. There are also about 10 000 troops from other countries in Afghanistan, including from the US’s partners in NATO.
Reaction to the news was generally split on party lines in the US, with Biden’s Republican opponents against the withdrawal, but with it largely being welcomed by Democrats.
However, there are concerns that the move comes at a difficult time for Afghanistan now that the Taliban, which the initial US invasion deposed, is once again gaining ground in the country.
The Financial Times quoted Sushant Sareen, a security analyst at the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank in New Delhi, as saying: ‘What rabbit are you going to pull out of your hat? The Taliban are already winning. There is a reasonable chance to keep the Taliban at bay if you keep funding the Afghan state, if you’re not going to do that it will be extremely difficult for the state to survive.’