Trump’s talk of troop withdrawals does not match military reality
When President Donald Trump said on Twitter last week that all U.S. troops in Afghanistan might be home by Christmas, he was reiterating a goal that has eluded him for years and most likely hoping that when it comes to ending military deployments, voters will give him more credit for his messaging than for his results.
Trump has long vowed to leave Afghanistan and, more broadly, to conclude what he calls the United States’ “endless wars” across the Middle East, reviving a core theme from his 2016 campaign that some data suggests could have played a crucial role in his election.
But with three months left in his first term, Trump has not welcomed home the last American soldier from anywhere. While he has withdrawn thousands of troops from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, thousands more still risk their lives there — a source of clear frustration for a president hoping to impress voters with unequivocal, unprecedented results.
And although his defenders insist he deserves credit for avoiding any major new U.S. interventions, making him the first president in decades to do so, Trump has deployed thousands of additional soldiers to the Persian Gulf in response to growing tensions with Iran, which some analysts warn could spill into a hot war if he is reelected. He has also done little to scale down major U.S. military bases in places like Qatar and Bahrain.
“The missing piece here is that tens of thousands of forces are deployed all across the Middle East, supporting ongoing operations in the region and beyond,” said Dana Stroul, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The president has even increased the U. S. military presence in Saudi Arabia. None of those forces have been withdrawn over the course of his term. His rhetoric does not match the reality of U.S. forces deployed across the Middle East today.”
Trump now presides over about 10,000 ground troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Syria combined, only slightly less than the number he inherited at the end of the Obama administration. Deployments ordered by Trump caused that number to rise as high as 26,000 by late 2017, according to a Pentagon report, before falling steadily in recent months.
After President Barack Obama left just under 10,000 troops in Afghanistan,
Trump ordered about 3,000 more to the country in 2017 before beginning a drawdown that has resulted in about 4,500 there today. He also increased troop levels in Syria, where U.S. forces have battled the Islamic State group, from about 500 under Obama to nearly 2,500 before dropping to a current level of 750. In Iraq, troop numbers were virtually unchanged from the end of the Obama era until last month, when the Pentagon said it would cut nearly half its forces there, to 3,000.