US troop deployments, 1950--2020

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Source: Complied by Tim Kane from DOD sources, Hoover Instutionn

 

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False Choices In Afghanistan

by Timothy Kane

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Why was President Biden committed not just to a drawdown but to an absolute withdrawal of US troops in Afghanistan until there were zero?

Some say that Americans are tired after twenty years of war. That the United States has never been involved in a war this long before, that the American presence has had no positive impact, and that the troops themselves are exhausted. None of that is true, but worse, these claims defy many years of American experience in both warfighting and peacekeeping.

American forces have been at war in Korea, technically, for seven decades. There have been forty-four thousand US troops in Korea, on average, since combat ended in 1953. Three times as long as the longest war. They are still there.

Likewise, America and her allies were in a deadly Cold War with the Soviets for half a century, with US forces deployed in a dozen European countries along the Iron Curtain from 1945 to 1991, the year the USSR imploded. The United States had more than ten thousand American soldiers based in Italy, triple that in the United Kingdom, and twenty times more in Germany. They too are still there.      https://www.hoover.org/research/false-choices-afghanistan