Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. We've made it to Wednesday. It's

November 18th. I'm Nailaboodoo. Here's how we're making you smarter today.

Corporate America's failure to retain black employees.

Plus a new group wants to jumpstart electric car sales. But first, the troop

withdrawal in Afghanistan is today's one big thing.

It was just over a week ago the President Trump fire Defense Secretary Mark Esper and yesterday we heard

acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller announce we'll be cutting back on the

number of troops in the Middle East. By January 15th, 2021, our forces, their size in Afghanistan, will be 2,500 troops.

Our force size in Iraq will also be 2,500 by that same date.

Axios' world editor, Dave Lawler, has been reporting on this.

And Dave, I wonder if we should back up for a minute and start with Mark Esper.

What do we know about why he was fired?

So Axios reported there's sort of two rationales for that.

One is that Mark Esper, who was the defense secretary, was an opponent of pulling out of Afghanistan and in fact a memo was leaked in

which he laid out his objections to the idea of pulling the troops down any more

before the end of Trump's term. So that was an obstacle to a policy that Trump

wanted and so he's out of the picture. And so now we've got Christopher Miller as

acting defense secretary and very quickly hear this announcement of withdrawing troops.

Can you give us any background on President Trump's decision-making here?

So you remember that Trump came into office having vowed on the campaign trail to end the war in Afghanistan,

but relatively quickly, he was actually convinced by his

national security at the time to recommit to the war in Afghanistan.

...