withdrawals, however, occurred despite the fact that the Defense Department inspector general’s office repeatedly reported that the Taliban worked with al-Qaeda.) troops is contingent on the “Taliban’s action against al-Qaeda and other terrorists who could threaten us,” Trump says in a speech at the Conservative Political Active Conference. had about 13,000 troops in Afghanistan, according to a Department of Defense inspector general report. withdrawal from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, but do not release two classified annexes that set the conditions for U.S. and Taliban sign an agreement that sets the terms for a U.S.
servicemen and servicewomen, cost a trillion dollars, and occupied the attention of four presidential administrations,” as the Afghanistan Study Group put it in a February report. military’s 20-year war in Afghanistan - a war that has “taken the lives of nearly 2,500 U.S. Here we lay out many of the key diplomatic decisions, military actions, presidential pronouncements and expert assessments of the withdrawal agreement that ended the U.S. intelligence assessed that the Afghan government would likely collapse. left, even if it meant it had to “continue our war to achieve our goal.”īiden assured Americans last month that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “not inevitable,” and denied that U.S. 31, despite obvious signs that the Taliban wasn’t complying with the agreement and had a stated goal to create an “Islamic government” in Afghanistan after the U.S. But ultimately his administration pushed ahead with a plan to withdraw by Aug. (Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)īiden delayed the May 1 withdrawal date that he inherited. Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman for nearly two decades, appears at a press conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug.