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Obama Accelerates Transition of Security to Afghans
(about 5 hours later)
WASHINGTON – President Obama, after meeting with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, said Friday that the United States would be able to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in coming months because of gains made by Afghan security forces.
WASHINGTON — President Obama, eager to turn the page after more than a decade of war, said Friday that beginning this spring American forces would play only a supporting role in Afghanistan, which opens the way for a more rapid withdrawal of the troops.
Mr. Obama also made it clear that he contemplated leaving relatively few troops in Afghanistan after the NATO combat mission ends in 2014, saying that the mission will be focused on advising and supporting Afghan troops and targeting the remnants of Al Qaeda.
Though Mr. Obama said he had not yet decided on specific troop levels for the rest of the year, he said the United States would accelerate the transition of security responsibilities to the Afghans, which had been set to occur at the middle of the year, because of gains by Afghan forces.
“That is a very limited mission, and it is not one that would require the same kind of footprint we’ve had over the last 10 years in Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said, standing next to Mr. Karzai at a joint news conference at the White House.
Mr. Obama also made it clear that he planned to leave relatively few troops in Afghanistan after the NATO combat mission ends in 2014, saying those forces would be narrowly focused on advising and training Afghan troops and hunting down the remnants of Al Qaeda.
Mr. Karzai professed to be comfortable with that, saying it was up to the United States to decide the size of a residual force. “Numbers are not going to make a difference in the situation in Afghanistan,” he said, noting that it was the nature of the broader relationship that mattered.
“That is a very limited mission, and it is not one that would require the same kind of footprint, obviously, that we’ve had over the last 10 years in Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said after a meeting with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, at the White House.
Addressing a major sticking point between the countries, Mr. Karzai said the United States had agreed to turn over control of the prisons that house terrorism suspects to Afghan control. That would happen, he said, “soon after” he returned to Kabul.
It was the first face-to-face encounter of the leaders since May, and it underscored the quickening pace at which the United States is winding down its involvement in Afghanistan.
Mr. Obama said that in order to leave any troops behind, the United States would require guarantees of legal immunity for its soldiers – a demand that the administration failed to obtain from Iraq, leading Mr. Obama to withdraw all remaining American troops from that country in 2011.
The war in Afghanistan was discussed in only general terms during the election campaign, but a series of decisions on troop levels and other issues is to be settled in the coming weeks and months.
Mr. Karzai, citing the agreement to transfer detention centers and the planned withdrawal of American troops from Afghan villages, said he would push for such legal immunity.
Mr. Karzai raised no public objections to troop cuts, saying he had obtained two important concessions from the United States: the transfer of prisons housing terrorism suspects to Afghan control, and the pullout of American troops from Afghan villages this spring.
“With those issues resolved, as we did today, I can go to the Afghan people and argue for immunity for U.S. troops in Afghanistan in a way that Afghan sovereignty will not be compromised, in a way that Afghan law will not be compromised.”
Brushing aside questions about residual American troop levels, Mr. Karzai said: “Numbers are not going to make a difference to the situation in Afghanistan. It’s the broader relationship that will make a difference to Afghanistan and beyond in the region.”
In a joint statement released before the news conference, Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai extolled the progress made by the Afghan security forces, noting that Afghan troops now take the lead in providing security in 80 percent of the country – a number that will rise to 90 percent by spring, when American and NATO troops are scheduled to move to a purely advisory role.
Mr. Karzai also said he would push to grant legal immunity to American troops left behind in Afghanistan — a guarantee that the United States failed to obtain from Iraq, leading Mr. Obama to withdraw all but a vestigial force from that country at the end of 2011.
At that time, the statement said, American soldiers will pull out of patrols in villages, a measure that Mr. Karzai had sought.
Mr. Obama’s signaling of deeper troop cuts to come appeared to run counter to the approach favored by Gen. John R. Allen, the senior American commander in Afghanistan. Two American officials said November that General Allen wanted to retain a significant military capacity through the fighting season that ends this fall.
Both leaders declined to be drawn into a discussion of the specific number of troops who would be involved in either the coming drawdown or in the residual force that would remain in Afghanistan after 2014. Mr. Obama said he would make decisions in the coming months based on the recommendations of his military commanders.
Other military experts raised concerns that the United States might forfeit some of its hard-won gains if it moved to shrink its forces in Afghanistan too quickly.
As the White House examines options for the size of a residual force, ranging from roughly 3,000 to 9,000 troops, Mr. Obama has directed his advisers to answer a basic question: Is such a force necessary to carry out the narrow counterterrorism objective and training mission the United States envisions for postwar Afghanistan?
James M. Dubik, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the effort to train the Iraqi Army and is a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, a nongovernmental research group, said that accelerating the effort to put Afghan forces in the lead posed risks.
Mr. Karzai came to Friday’s meeting with far different expectations, according to Afghan officials.
“There will be insufficient combat power to finish the counteroffensive against the Haqqani network in the east,” he said, referring to the militant group that operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Although he has been careful not to discuss specific troop numbers in public, Mr. Karzai appears to be counting on a substantial residual American force — perhaps as many as 15,000 troops, whose mission would be to advise Afghan security forces in their fight against the Taliban insurgency and carry out raids against Al Qaeda.
General Dubik also said that the success of the effort to have Afghan forces lead this spring would depend on whether they continued to benefit from American and allied air power, logistical help and medical evacuations, as well as NATO advisers.
And he is hoping the United States will supply the Afghan Army with the latest military hardware, including tanks and fighter planes.
Still, the public display of harmony by the two leaders was mirrored by their private discussions, White House officials said. Aides said the atmosphere was warm — “surprisingly so,” in the words of one — given their often tense relationship. Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai appeared to appreciate the candor of the exchanges, officials said.
These very different expectations, analysts said, could reignite the tensions in a relationship between Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai that has been notoriously fraught over issues like corruption, civilian casualties and threats to Afghan sovereignty.
For his part, Mr. Karzai sought to allay fears that he might not yield power after Afghan elections scheduled for next year. “In a year and few months from today, I will be a retired president,” he said in a speech later Friday at Georgetown University.
“There’s been a steady rollback of our objectives of what’s good enough in Afghanistan,” said Vali Nasr, a former senior State Department official who worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan and is the dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Mr. Obama extolled what he said was the progress made by Afghan security forces. By spring, he said, nearly 90 percent of Afghans will live in areas where Afghan forces are taking the lead in providing security. At that time, American and NATO troops will give up a combat role and revert to an advisory and support role.
“If you’re Karzai, you’re basically now facing the same calculation that Maliki did in Iraq,” said Mr. Nasr, referring to Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister. " ‘If you’re not willing to stay in large numbers, why do I need you?’ ”
The president’s sanguine outlook, however, seemed at odds with a Pentagon report issued in December, which asserted that only one of the Afghan National Army’s 23 brigades was able to operate independently without air or other military support from the United States and NATO partners.
The possibilities for friction are compounded by cynicism on both sides: the sense in Washington that Mr. Karzai is a mercurial, unreliable partner, and the suspicion in Kabul that the Americans care about Afghanistan only when they need it for other purposes, like fighting Al Qaeda.
The leaders reaffirmed their interest in a political settlement with the Taliban, with plans to open an office in Qatar as a locus for peace talks. But with negotiations at a standstill, Mr. Obama left little doubt that the Afghans would take the lead in any bargaining.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former commander in Afghanistan, warned in a recent interview that if the United States shrank too radically its advisory support for the Afghan military or curtailed its civilian programs, it might lose Afghan support for the counterterrorism operations it might want to continue there.
“The United States has been very clear that any peace process, any reconciliation process, must be Afghan-led,” he said. “It is not for the United States to determine what the terms of this peace will be.”
“If you don’t have the support of the Afghan people,” he said, “there’s no reason for them to be supportive of this.”
The waning American role in Afghanistan’s future was evident when Mr. Obama was pressed about fears that women could face renewed discrimination after any settlement with the Taliban.
It is a measure of the potential disconnect between Mr. Karzai and Mr. Obama that Afghan officials involved in preparing his trip said the belief in the Afghan leader’s inner circle was that Mr. Karzai was coming to the talks with the upper hand.
He said the United States would speak up for the rights of Afghan women — rights which he noted were enshrined in the Afghan Constitution. But he said it was up to the Taliban to adhere to the Constitution and recognize that if they wanted to change how the Afghan government operates, they would have to do so in a lawful manner.
In Mr. Karzai’s view, these officials and other people close to the president said, the United States needs a robust American presence in Afghanistan after 2014 to keep Al Qaeda off balance and Iran and Pakistan at bay. The Afghans “think they are indispensable; they think they have all the leverage,” one Afghan official said.
“The president said several good things about the importance of women’s rights,” said John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, “but very little about how the U.S. and Afghanistan will ensure that negotiations do not endanger them. President Karzai, for his part, said nothing.”
The Afghans were readying complaints about the United States’ continuing to detain Afghans at a prison next to Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, which was supposed to have been handed over to Afghan authorities in September.
Some of Mr. Karzai’s advisers are aware of the tenuous support at the White House for the war effort. Fearful of a repeat of Iraq, where Mr. Obama ordered a total military withdrawal, they have prevailed on the Afghan president to soften his position on granting immunity to any American troops stationed in Afghanistan after 2014, which he has done in recent months.
The ideal outcome for Mr. Karzai, these officials said, would be an American and allied training force that would help the Afghan Army make the most of the billions in aid it is expecting to receive, and a robust counterterrorism force that could work with Afghan Special Forces to combat the remnants of Al Qaeda.
The White House’s calculation looks very different. While cost was a consideration in Iraq, Mr. Obama is more sensitive now to the budget consequences of keeping troops in Afghanistan after his bruising fiscal showdown with Congress, and the prospect of huge mandatory cuts in the Pentagon’s budget.
“You’ve got to step back and see the whole field from the point of view of taxpayer spending,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
To some extent, officials said, the administration’s floating of a “zero option” for troops is a bargaining ploy, with both the Pentagon and with Mr. Karzai.
But resolving the differences between the United States and the Afghan government, if they are resolved, is likely to have a profound effect on the long-term commitment of other NATO members.
An allied official said that if the White House opted for a minimal troop presence, the rest of the NATO allies were expected to follow suit, especially since the war was even more unpopular among their publics. Many critics complain that Mr. Karzai has been slow to pursue corruption. But some analysts said the emerging American policy might deepen Mr. Karzai’s insecurities.
“We will not be able to give Karzai any more spine to go after cronyism and nepotism,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on Afghanistan at the Brookings Institution.
The one issue on which both sides appear in sync is the peace process, according to the Afghan officials and people close to the Afghan leader. Like their American counterparts, Afghan officials want to see negotiations with the Taliban make progress and offer rosy public assessments of the diplomatic effort.
But privately, the Afghans are aware that there have been no meaningful engagements with the Taliban in nearly a year, and that until the insurgents prove willing to sit down, the peace process will make little headway.
Michael R. Gordon and Matthew Rosenberg contributed reporting.
