US to ask NATO for 1,000 more troops for Afghanistan
The US will ask NATO members to contribute about 1,000 extra troops to help in the battle against the Taliban militant group in Afghanistan, the new US ambassador to the military alliance says.
The additional NATO troops would add to the roughly 3,000 US forces already on their way to Afghanistan under US President Donald Trump's new strategy against the Taliban, Kay Bailey Hutchison said Thursday.
The United States already has about 8,400 troops in the country alongside another 5,000 from NATO forces.
Taliban militants have warned that they will be stepping up their attacks until the US and other NATO members fully withdraw from Afghanistan after more than a decade and half of occupation.
Back in 2014, the US-led occupying forces in Afghanistan officially announced the end of their combat operations in the country, saying they now had a mission to “train, advise, and assist” Afghan troops.
However, the Trump’s administration recently permitted the deployment of an additional 3,000 troops to Afghanistan to engage with the Taliban.
Trump who had previously called for withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan argued that his "original instinct was to pull out," but that he was convinced by his national security team to take on the Taliban militants.
The United States -- under Republican George W. Bush’s presidency -- and its allies invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror. The offensive removed the Taliban regime from power, but after 16 years, the foreign troops are still deployed to the country.
After becoming the president in 2008, President Barack Obama, a Democrat, vowed to end the Afghan war -- one of the longest conflicts in US history – but he failed to keep his promise.
US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Tuesday that an American withdrawal from Afghanistan would be "to our ultimate peril."
"Based on intelligence community analysis and my own evaluation, I am convinced we would absent ourselves from this region at our peril," Mattis said while briefing the US Congress on plans to increase American troop levels in the South Asian country.
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