U.S. President Donald Trump has told aides that he wants to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan before the presidential election in November 2020, U.S. news agencies are reporting, citing unnamed current and former administration officials.
The Pentagon is preparing to withdraw thousands of troops from Afghanistan as part of a proposed peace deal with the Taliban, U.S. officials told Fox News Thursday.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday during a visit to Afghanistan that the Trump administration is aiming for a peace deal in the war-ravaged country by September.
American and Taliban officials resumed talks in Qatar to end a 17-year war in Afghanistan on Wednesday while the Afghan government hosted a rare assembly in Kabul to ensure its interests are upheld in any peace deal.
The Air Force’s most advanced fighter jet has, for the first time, been deployed to the Middle East.
The United States and the Taliban have reached a draft agreement on counter-terrorism assurances and troop withdrawal in a step toward ending the 17-year-long war, U.S. presidential envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said Tuesday.
President Trump gave an emphatic defense of his intention to conclude ‘endless wars,’ one day after the Senate issued a warning against a ‘precipitous withdrawal’ from Syria and Afghanistan.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said Monday the Taliban should ‘enter serious talks’ with his government, as both the Taliban and Washington’s top envoy touted significant progress during unprecedented negotiations in Qatar last week.
The US special envoy to Afghanistan hopes to cement a peace deal with Taliban insurgents by April 2019, local media reported on Sunday.
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis arrived in Kabul on Friday to meet the new commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan and discuss progress on talks with the Taliban, despite deteriorating security and turmoil within the Afghan government.
Although the Taliban overran a base in northern Afghanistan, and Afghan forces were battling insurgents for a fifth day in the eastern city of Ghazni on Tuesday, the U.S. military reported that the city ‘remains under Afghan government control.’
The Taliban is on the verge of dramatically expanding its control over southern and eastern Afghanistan in a surprise offensive that has caught Afghan and American forces off guard and thrown a vexing new wrench into the Trump administration’s strategy for ending the nearly 17-year-old war there.
The United States is open to holding direct talks with the Taliban to encourage negotiations between the militant group and the Afghan government to end 17 years of war, U.S. officials said Monday.
As Afghanistan edged ever closer to becoming a narco-state five years ago, a team of veteran U.S. officials in Kabul presented the Obama administration with a detailed plan to use U.S. courts to prosecute the Taliban commanders and allied drug lords who supplied more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin — including a growing amount fueling the nascent opioid crisis in the United States.
More than 50 senior Taliban commanders were killed in an artillery strike on a meeting in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday, as fighting continues across the country.
Lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee introduced new Authorization for the Use of Military Force legislation to replace current war authorizations from 2001 and 2002 that have not been revised since they were passed.
The US has set a record for the number of guided bombs dropped from a single bomber in a series of strikes against the Taliban.
Suicide bombers and militants firing mortars attacked Kabul’s airport during a visit by U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Wednesday, prompting a U.S. air strike that accidentally killed civilians, officials said.
Eleven Afghans who participated in this weekend’s presidential runoff poll had their index fingers cut off by Taliban insurgents as punishment for voting.
Obama administration officials refused to fully explain to key senators the justification for freeing five senior Taliban leaders that the White House had once considered to be among the most dangerous prisoners being held in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, according to senior Senate insiders familiar with a closed-door briefing held Tuesday for members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.