US Troop Draw Down in Afghanistan by 2021

Pakistan's PM goes to Afghanistan as U.S. prepares drawdown, peace talks stall

KABUL (Reuters) - Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan arrived in Kabul on Thursday to meet with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, at a time when peace negotiations between the Afghan government and Taliban representatives have stalled and violence is rising.

This will be Khan’s first visit to Afghanistan since assuming office over two years ago. It is the highest profile visit by a Pakistani official to Kabul since peace talks began between the Taliban and the Afghan government in the Qatari capital of Doha...

Mistrust has cloaked relations between the neighbours, due to Pakistan’s covert support for the Taliban during the past two decades. And as militants later began launching attacks inside Pakistan, it accused Afghanistan of stirring trouble in its borders.

“Focus would be on further deepening the fraternal bilateral relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Afghan peace process, and regional economic development and connectivity,” Pakistan’s foreign office said in a statement as Khan headed for Kabul...

Acting SecDef Visits Afghanistan, Helps Set the Stage for the US Withdrawal

KABUL -- As the U.S. rapidly draws down forces to just 2,500 in Afghanistan by the middle of next month, acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller paid a visit to the country, meeting with troops and participating in bilateral talks with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Dec. 22.

Miller, a former Army Special Forces officer who was part of the first small contingent of troops to invade Afghanistan in 2001, had not been back since 2007. In opening remarks to Ghani, he recalled having "fiery red hair" on his last deployment in the country. He expressed his condolences to the Afghan president for recent attacks and other unattributed incidents of violence, and reaffirmed the United States' commitment to the people of Afghanistan...

A senior defense official earlier this week confirmed that the planned drawdown timeline was proceeding on track. As of late November the combined NATO forces on the group in Afghanistan, about 11,000, which includes the U.S. contingent, outweighs the total number of U.S. troops on the ground.

The Pentagon announced the current withdrawal timeline in mid-November, after the presidential election. At that time, about 4,500 U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan.

Troop levels are down, but US says over 18,000 contractors remain in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Pentagon employs more than seven contractors for every service member in Afghanistan, figures from U.S. Central Command show.

More than 18,000 contractors remain in Afghanistan, a Defense Department report released this week said, after the Pentagon announced Friday it had reduced its troop total in the country to 2,500.

The contractor population decreased by about 4,300 from last October, down about 20%. The drawdown of U.S. troops over the last year “drove reductions in requirements for contracted support,” the report said...

About 4,700 of the contractors are Afghans hired locally, but nearly three-quarters come from outside the country, including about a third who are U.S. citizens, the data in this week’s report show. Many of the rest are from developing countries such as Uganda and Nepal.

Slightly less than half work in logistics, maintenance or base support, with 16% working as security contractors, the report said. Only 1,575, mostly Americans and other foreigners, are armed security personnel...

How flawed information created a ‘Taliban’ threat

When is a Taliban not a Taliban?

In Oruzgan, where Australian troops served from 2006 to 2013, it was when false intelligence led to avoidable killings...

The Australians were often informed by local allies with vested interests. Counter-intelligence was not listened to, as Justice Paul Brereton also noted in his report. Afghans who complained were discharged as unreliable.

The man responsible for much of this false intelligence was Matiullah Khan, Oruzgan’s police commander and a local strongman who — thanks to international intervention — became a powerful and wealthy political player...

The US special forces were the first to arrive in Oruzgan after 9/11 and they backed the local governor, Matiullah’s uncle Jan Mohammad Khan, who used his time in power to install allies from his Popalzai tribe in positions across the province’s 10 districts.

The US assumed, since it was paying for these men’s loyalty, that they shared the same ideology: to kill the terrorists or Taliban...

Australian diplomat Fred Smith, who spent several years working in Oruzgan, wrote in his book The Dust of Oruzgan of a conversation with two so-called local “Taliban” who explained to him that “there was no Taliban in the area in 2002”.

In those early years “everyone wanted to join the government”, one of the men recounted. “We even gave up our weapons. But then the government turned people into Taliban. In the second year of Jan Mohammad Khan, my nephew was killed by a police commander.”

That didn’t only happen in Oruzgan. It is still not widely understood that in the first years after 9/11 most of the Afghan Taliban — including their leadership — had left the battlefield and were looking to surrender.

This potential end to the war was ignored by the US, which viewed al-Qa’ida and the Taliban as similar threats, and the storyline was soon dropped by the media. Instead of using diplomacy to set-up an inclusive government, the US and its allies sent troops...

The Taliban that eventually re-emerged in Oruzgan weren’t diehard anti-Westerners but locals with tribal grievances who shifted loyalties to latent Taliban commanders to avenge the antagonisms of the provincial strong­men...