NATO will stay in
Afghanistan for four more years, a senior NATO official said this week.
Despite plans by the United States to reduce its troop
strength by the end of 2016, the 28 countries that are members of NATO
will
pledge $5 billion each
at a July meeting in Warsaw to train, equip and pay Afghan troops and
security forces, the unnamed diplomat said. Bases in Kandahar and
Jalalabad provinces, scheduled to close, will remain open.
The Warsaw conference is expected to result in the
resolution of key issues about the state of the alliance and the future of NATO's mission in Afghanistan.
The proposed plan will offer President
Barack Obama
some flexibility when deciding U.S. troop strength in what has become
the United States' longest war. The war began in October of 2001 with
the U.S. invasion. NATO became involved in 2003.
There are now 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Plans call
for a reduction to 5,500 by the end of the year. Obama had hoped to
reduce that number to zero by the end of his term, but a revived Taliban
has retaken territory in the past year and strained the capability of
Afghan troops.
Last week, U.S. troops
were given expanded authority
to attack Taliban installations, to advise Afghan combat units and to
call in airstrikes. The moves, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has
said, put U.S. troops in closer proximity to Taliban fighters.
Additional NATO troops will be deployed to Afghanistan through at least 2017, NATO Secretary-General
Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday, adding, "We are working now on the final decisions for our exact force numbers, into 2017."
Comments
Post a Comment