A senior administration official said this is not a conditions-based approach, telling @margbrennan POTUS has deemed that to be "a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever." United States will remove its forces from Afghanistan "before September 11," SAO said.
https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1382004300801576965
The official said the decision is also reflective of the need to address a "global threat picture as it exists today, not as it was two decades ago."
SAO: "This is not 2001; it is 2021. And in 2021, the terrorist threat that we face is real and it emanates from a number of countries, indeed a number of continents....And we have to focus on those aspects of a dispersed and distributed terrorist threat"
Remaining military presence in Afghanistan will be "the force required to protect our diplomatic presence," per SAO, but "we have communicated to the Taliban in no uncertain terms that if they do conduct attacks against US or allied forces...we will hit back hard"
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