KABUL: Afghans should not misconstrue America's sudden and contentious withdrawal from parts of Syria as a precursor to a similar move in Afghanistan, US Defence Secretary Mark Esper said Monday.
The Pentagon chief also hinted that some sort of residual US force might remain in Syria to protect oil fields, but stressed no decision had been taken. The US last week announced the withdrawal of 1,000 American troops from northeast Syria, days after Turkey launched an offensive against the previously US-backed Kurdish People´s Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara considers a terrorist group.
The move provoked outrage from observers and even members of President Donald Trump´s Republican Party, who saw the sudden withdrawal as a betrayal of the same Kurdish fighters the US had been training and arming for years to fight Islamic State in Syria.
Speaking at NATO´s Resolute Support mission headquarters in Kabul, Esper said America maintains a "long standing commitment" to Afghanistan, which it invaded in 2001 to oust the Taliban, and noted US policy direction for the country is completely different.
"All these things should reassure our Afghan allies and others that they should not misinterpret our actions in the recent week or so with regard to Syria and contrast that with Afghanistan," he said.
Underscoring America´s will to stay in Afghanistan, Esper said, was that it still faces a "virulent terrorist threat that originated in the form of Al-Qaeda and now finds itself in the Taliban and ISIS-K and other groups". ISIS-K is the abbreviation for the Afghan Islamic State affiliate.
The US and the Taliban were last month on the brink of signing a deal that would have seen some American forces begin to withdraw from Afghanistan in return for various insurgent security commitments.
But negotiations collapsed at the last minute when Trump declared talks "dead" following Taliban attacks including one that killed a US soldier. On Syria, Esper said the withdrawal of US forces would take "weeks not days", and raised the possibility that some troops would stay for now in towns near oil fields as a way of preventing IS and other groups seizing them.—