Biden announces troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

A final withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan will begin on 1 May, punctuating two decades of occupation as President Joe Biden aims to remove America’s footprint from a “forever war” that has cost thousands of lives, while the nation’s focus shifts to terror threats that have “metastasised” around the globe.

Mr Biden said he believed a US presence in Afghanistan should “be focused on the reason why we went in the first place – to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again”.