Trump To Withdraw 'significant' Troops From Afghanistan

Kabul, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 21st Dec, 2018 ) :US President Donald Trump has decided to pull a significant number of troops from Afghanistan, a US official has told AFP, but the Afghan presidency on Friday brushed off concerns the drawdown would affect security.

Reports suggested as many as half of the 14,000 troops in the war-torn country could be leaving.

The move stunned and dismayed diplomats and officials in Kabul who are intensifying a push to end the 17-year conflict with the Taliban, which already controls vast amounts of territory and is causing "unsustainable" Afghan troop casualties.

"If you're the Taliban, Christmas has come early," a senior foreign official in the Afghan capital told AFP on the condition of anonymity.

"Would you be thinking of a ceasefire if your main opponent has just withdrawn half their troops?" Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid would not comment about the troop withdrawal when contacted by AFP. But a senior Taliban commander welcomed the decision.

"Frankly speaking we weren't expecting that immediate US response," the official told AFP from an unknown location in northwest Pakistan.

"We are more than happy, they realised the truth. We are expecting more good news." It is not clear if US peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad or the Afghan government had been warned of Trump's plans in advance.

A spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Haroon Chakhansuri, downplayed the news, saying: "(I)t will not have a security impact because in the last four and half years the Afghans have been in full control." But Afghans across the country expressed fears that a US troop withdrawal could derail peace efforts, return the Taliban to power, and dissolve the country into civil war.

"We are terrified that history will be repeated," Fazli Ahmad, a car washer in the southern city of Kandahar, told AFP.

Shaima Dabeer, a 50-year-old housewife in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, said she feared for the future of her children.

"Afghanistan will go back to the Taliban era," she told AFP.