U.S. Looking To Reduce Kabul Embassy Staff As Afghanistan Mission Changes

President Trump has said he wants to move away from "endless wars," and suggested cutting half of the 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Now the State Department is looking at cuts of its own in Afghanistan.

NPR has obtained talking points written by staff at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. It says the embassy is too big and calls for a "comprehensive review" to determine that it's "right-sized for the long-term."

Here's a key paragraph in the one-page document.

"Our presence in Kabul has grown over the years to the current extraordinary footprint. This Mission is now the largest in the world by far, and bigger than we should be (twice the size of other large embassies and 35 percent larger than Baghdad)."

The Kabul embassy did not respond to a request for comment. A State Department official would only say "we do not comment on internal communications." One official told NPR the cuts are being pushed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Officials rarely discuss the size of any embassy, and there's no sense in the document what the right size is for the one in Kabul. Staffing in Kabul is clearly in the thousands, including contractors and local staff. It sits on a sprawling campus of offices and housing in the center of the city, across from the U.S. military headquarters.