Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that even after President Obama withdraws 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by September 2012, there will still be “twice as many” U.S. troops in the country as there were when he took office. Clinton testified, "When the president became president, there were waiting on his desk requests for additional troops. At the time president Obama was inaugurated, there were, give or take, about 30,000-plus American troops [in Afghanistan] and there was no doubt that our attention had shifted to Iraq in the preceding years and that in Iraq there had been a negotiated agreement with the Iraqi government by our government, the Bush administration, as to when our troops would come out.
"With Afghanistan there was nothing, there was an open-ended commitment. There was evidence of our losing to the Taliban, so he (Obama) not only put in the surge, he put in an additional 38,000 troops. So I think when all is said and done, we will still have more than twice as many troops [in Afghanistan] as when he took office in January of 2009," Clinton said.
According to Clinton, after Obama's troop withdrawal is completed, about 60,000 U.S. soldiers will remain in Afghanistan because she mentioned that there were about 30,000 there when Obama took office.