The United States is "doing fine" in Afghanistan and will soon see its troops in the Islamic republic halved to 8,000 soldiers, President Donald Trump said in an interview with the Time magazine amid nearing US-Taliban talks.

AVA- "As you know in Afghanistan, when I got there, it was 16,000 people. It’s now 9,000 people. And some good things are happening there frankly. No, I’d like to get out of the Middle East, we should have never been in the Middle East. We should have never been there, and I’d like to get out", Trump said in the Thursday interview.
He reiterated that he was always against spending billions of dollars and losing an "unbelievable numbers of lives" on both sides.
"It was a terrible decision to go in. It’s quicksand. Always has been, always will be. And we’re doing just fine. We did ISIS. We’re doing fine in terms of Afghanistan. We’re down to half — we’ll soon be down to about 8,000 soldiers," he added.
US forces have been waging war in Afghanistan since late 2001. The deployment of American and NATO troops came as a response to the deadly 9/11 attacks in the US the same year.
In February, Trump said that future reductions in US forces would be tied to progress in peace talks, apparently backing away from a December announcement of plans to cut the present US deployment in Afghanistan.