KABUL as part of the President Donald Trump administration’s plant to extricate Washington from costly and deadly nearly two decades of war, Foreign Policy reported on Saturday.
The State Department is preparing to cut by half the number of US diplomats posted in Kabul in 2020, according to three US officials familiar with internal deliberations.
It may also advance plans to reduce the number of diplomats posted to the US Embassy in Iraq as Washington winds down its war footing in the Middle East and South Asia to prepare for what it calls an era of “great-power competition” with China and Russia.
The deliberations coincide with US peace talks with the Taliban and assessments on how to withdraw US military forces from Afghanistan.
Once obscure diplomatic outposts, the US embassies in Kabul and Baghdad ballooned into the largest and costliest diplomatic missions in the world following US military interventions there. Diplomats comprise only a portion of embassy personnel in both Kabul and Baghdad, which includes officials from other federal agencies, contractors, and security staff.
In February, NPR reported on a leaked internal document from the US Embassy in Kabul that called the outpost too big and urged a “comprehensive review” of its size, though the document did not outline the scale of the proposed cuts.
The State Department’s presence in Afghanistan pales in comparison to the US military’s, but the embassy in Kabul, along with the embassy in Baghdad, makes up a disproportionate size of State’s budget and personnel compared with embassies in other parts of the world. Some diplomats believe it’s time to shift those resources elsewhere.
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