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Afghans Approve Security Pact, but Karzai Adds a Hitch Afghan Council Approves Security Pact, but Karzai Withholds His Signature
(about 4 hours later)
KABUL, Afghanistan — A grand council of elders approved a security agreement with the United States on Sunday, but President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan said he wanted to keep negotiating, throwing relations between the two countries into uncertainty. KABUL, Afghanistan — An angry President Hamid Karzai, at times stridently anti-American and openly hostile to his allies, on Sunday rejected the recommendation of a grand council that he should promptly sign a security agreement with the United States.
While the council, known as a loya jirga, overwhelmingly approved the pact and asked Mr. Karzai to sign it promptly — as the Americans have requested — the loya jirga’s decisions were not binding. “On your behalf we will try to bargain more with the Americans and then we will sign this agreement,” Mr. Karzai told the group. Even though he had convened the council, or loya jirga, to ratify his decision to sign the agreement, Mr. Karzai told the assembled elders that he would do so only after further negotiations.
“Give me a chance to do politics and don’t give this agreement for free to the Americans,” Mr. Karzai said, adding, “once we are sure we are on the path of peace and Afghanistan has a new president.” He also demanded that American forces cease raids on Afghan homes immediately, saying that he would nullify any bilateral security agreement if there was even one more such raid.
The United States has insisted that unless a security agreement is signed this year, there will not be enough time to plan for a long-term military presence after 2014. In practical terms, that would mean an end to the last remaining combat missions being carried out by American troops on a regular basis: raids by elite units aimed at capturing high-profile insurgents.
It was the end to a contentious, four-day jirga, during which Mr. Karzai twice picked quarrels with his American allies. “From this moment on, America’s searching of houses, blocking of roads and streets, military operations are over, and our people are free in their country,” Mr. Karzai said, his voice filled with emotion.
American officials reacted with anger and exasperation Saturday after Mr. Karzai accused American Special Forces troops of killing civilians in a raid; the officials said it was an Afghan-led raid that killed only insurgents. “If Americans raid a house again, then this agreement will not be signed,” he said, with the American ambassador, James B. Cunningham, in the audience.
Moreover, Mr. Karzai’s aides continued to insist that even if the council ratified the bilateral security agreement, Mr. Karzai would not sign it until next year, after a presidential election to choose his successor, but before he leaves office. Equally worrisome for American policy makers was that the Afghan president appeared to insist on putting off signing the security agreement until after Afghan elections next April; the United States has insisted that an agreement needs to be signed by the end of this year to give American and NATO forces time to plan for a new phase in Afghanistan after the combat mission concludes at the end of 2014.
The remarks from the president’s camp left many people wondering why Mr. Karzai had convened a loya jirga, bringing to Kabul 2,500 Afghan notables from around the country, dismissing most employees from work for six days and locking down a city of five million so thoroughly that all roads to it were blocked for several days. Western diplomats warned that Mr. Karzai was playing a risky game of brinkmanship. “He’s definitely pushed too far,” one diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the dispute. “There’s a general consensus that he’s overestimated the importance to the Americans of the agreement and is thinking that they must have it at all costs. The Americans internally are very clear: that it’s not a vital strategic interest, and he doesn’t get that.”
Even Mr. Karzai’s allies were at a loss to explain what he hoped to gain from the perplexing series of events around what was expected to be a straightforward deal. Mr. Karzai had earlier asked the Americans to delay signing the agreement until a new president was elected, possibly allowing him to pass responsibility for the deal to his successor. A prominent Afghan opposition leader, Abdullah Abdullah, said: “I have no doubt in my mind there are politicians thinking back in the U.S. about the zero option” — a complete American military withdrawal — “and this will further strengthen their argument. There’s a possibility that will backfire and the price will be paid by the people of Afghanistan.”
Mr. Karzai might also view a delay as a way to wring more concessions from the United States or retain political leverage and avoid being seen as a lame-duck president. Mr. Karzai’s own loya jirga on Sunday endorsed the wording of the agreement and approved a resolution calling on the president to sign it by the end of this year. But its decisions were not legally binding, and Mr. Karzai made it clear that he was not ready to sign anytime soon. “On your behalf we will try to bargain more with the Americans and then we will sign this agreement,” Mr. Karzai told the jirga.
Secretary of State John Kerry warned the Afghan leader in a telephone call on Friday that there would be no agreement if it was not signed within a month. “Give me a chance to do politics and don’t give this agreement for free to the Americans,” he said, adding that he would sign it “once we are sure we are on the path of peace and Afghanistan has a new president.”
Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi, said Saturday that Mr. Karzai felt that Mr. Kerry had threatened him during the conversation, which Mr. Faizi described as “tense.” “When the U.S. secretary of state says if there is no agreement there will be no security,” Mr. Faizi said, “We can say there is pressure, there is threats.” The jirga ended on a dramatic note when its organizer, Sebghatullah Mujadidi, a longtime Karzai ally, took the podium after Mr. Karzai’s speech and threatened that if the bilateral security agreement was not signed in three days, “I will resign all my positions and seek refuge in another country.” Mr. Karzai then returned to the podium and angrily insisted, “America cannot kill anyone in their homes.”
American officials have insisted that without a deal this year, they would not have time to prepare a force for its mission after 2014, which the security agreement calls for. Mr. Abdullah said it showed how out of touch Mr. Karzai was that even his handpicked jirga opposed his decision to delay signing the bilateral security agreement.
The Afghans dismiss that. “We don’t believe there’s any zero option,” Mr. Faizi said. “We believe if they have waited until now, they can wait five more months.” Atiqullah Baryalai, a former deputy defense minister and military analyst, also criticized Mr. Karzai. “He has no choice but to sign the B.S.A., but every day he keeps coming up with new excuses,” Mr. Baryalai said. “The Taliban will gain more control and power if the B.S.A. doesn’t get signed on time.”
“There is no deadline for us,” he added. “We have said that in the past.” For their part, the Taliban denounced the jirga without taking any note of the political dispute between Mr. Karzai and the Americans. Calling the jirga’s decision “an historic crime,” the insurgents said the delegates “proved once again that with American guidance they are ready to sell out their country and accept any kind of disgrace.”
He said Mr. Karzai believed that the Americans could not be trusted to keep their agreement, and even though both sides agreed on the wording, he wanted to wait until after the election next April to test further conditions: whether American forces would stop raids on Afghan homes, help promote peace talks and not interfere in the election. A spokesman for the American Embassy, Robert Hilton, said that officials were still studying Mr. Karzai’s remarks and the jirga’s recommendations on the security agreement. “We continue to believe it should be concluded as quickly as possible and that is in the interest of both nations,” he said.
Western diplomats saw that as effectively reopening talks on the security agreement, despite Mr. Karzai’s public agreement to its terms on Wednesday. Mr. Karzai said he intended to reopen negotiations over the security agreement, adding three broad conditions before it would be signed: an immediate end to raids on Afghan homes, good-faith efforts by the Americans to promote the peace process and their assurance of “transparency” in the elections.
“He’s negotiating in public,” one diplomat said. Referring to his talks with Secretary of State John Kerry, Mr. Karzai told jirga delegates that “he asked me to sign it in one month, but how can peace be restored in one month?”
“It’s a totally different situation when the president of a country has no trust in the U.S.,” Mr. Faizi said. “That means everything, that’s a totally different way of doing things.” “I will sign it and there will be no guarantee of peace and I will be blamed for everything in history,” he added.
When Mr. Karzai first brought up the idea of delaying the signing of the accord, in his opening remarks to the jirga on Thursday, American officials hastened to find a reliable translation of his comments. Many who were there could not believe their ears, including the American ambassador and American commander. Making peace a condition for signing an agreement on a long-term American military presence seemed to be setting an impossibly high bar. American and Afghan efforts to start peace talks with the Taliban have faltered repeatedly, although Afghan officials have expressed suspicion that the Americans are not putting enough pressure on other players, such as the Pakistanis who give the Taliban sanctuary.
The part where he said he did not trust them and they did not trust him was clear enough, but not signing what he had agreed to sign once the jirga approved it: that was puzzling. As the Americans saw it, the delay risked bringing to a crashing and unsatisfactory end an investment of half a trillion dollars and 2,292 American lives, along with 1,105 other coalition deaths. Similarly, Americans are not involved in preparations for Afghan elections, but Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi, said the president was concerned that the Americans might interfere in the process.
Only a week earlier, diplomats were calling Mr. Kerry “the Karzai Whisperer,” after he came to Kabul and resolved most of the deadlock over the security agreement in early October. In addition, Mr. Karzai’s demand to end home raids immediately goes far beyond what was negotiated in the security agreement, which bans them beginning in 2015, except in extraordinary circumstances to save American lives.
That term is used only ironically now. In more recent contacts, both the Americans and the Afghans have come away with sharply divergent accounts of what the two men had agreed to. According to one such account, Mr. Kerry said that President Obama would apologize for American conduct during the war, which Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama’s aides denied had ever been discussed. Both sides said that the issue of home raids had been the final sticking point as of Wednesday, and that at the last minute it was resolved with the “extraordinary circumstances” compromise, along with a public letter of assurances from President Obama.
And Friday night, just after Mr. Karzai and Mr. Kerry ended their conversation, a statement on the Afghan presidency’s website quoted Mr. Karzai as accusing American Special Forces troops of killing two twin brothers, a mason and a plumber, in a raid on an Afghan home in Nangarhar Province last Tuesday, two days before the jirga started. Then Mr. Karzai became aware of a night raid that killed twin brothers in Nangarhar Province last week, and that provoked protests by villagers. The Americans said it was a joint, Afghan-led raid that killed two armed insurgents after they opened fire, but they conceded that a coalition adviser was among those who killed the two men. Afghan officials said that it was a unilateral, American Special Forces raid; that the only Afghans present were American employees or mercenaries, not regular Afghan forces; and that the victims were innocent villagers.
The American-led coalition insisted that the raid had been led by Afghans, not Americans; that it killed gun-wielding insurgents, not civilian construction workers; and that complaints about the incident, delayed until the jirga had started, were obviously politically inspired. “On the very day that the jirga was opened, the Americans raided a house in Bati Kot and killed our compatriots,” Mr. Karzai said in his speech Sunday. (Actually the raid took place Tuesday night, while the jirga convened Thursday.) “Does this mean that even after we sign this agreement the Americans will keep on killing our people?”
“There is no doubt that these are spurious civilian casualty allegations,” a senior Western official said. “People are fairly mad at Karzai now; there’s a lot of anger and a lot of disdain.” Many observers saw it as a high-stakes gamble.
Throughout the negotiations over the loya jirga, coalition officials had been deliberately silent, but this time they pushed back, at least on the military side. “I think Karzai can very easily miscalculate,” a Western official said. “Likewise, the U.S. could too, and so there is uncertainty all around. Emotions are running high, and we need to try and not be as emotional as Karzai during this critical time.”
“Unfortunately, some people are using allegations of civilian casualties for political purposes,” an International Security Assistance Force official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity as a matter of official policy. The official said it was likely that the Afghan president, who has long been prone to emotional outbursts, would become more volatile with the approach of elections and the end of his term. “That is why it is important to wrap this up sooner as opposed to later,” the official said.
“The statement goes directly to asserting this was a unilateral operation,” the official said, referring to Mr. Karzai’s statement. “It was not. It was Afghan-led with 100 Afghan National Security Force personnel and 17 coalition advisers.” However, an I.S.A.F. spokesman, John D. Manley, confirmed that “Afghan National Security Forces and a coalition adviser engaged and killed” two Afghans. The official also expressed concern about how Afghanistan’s huge security establishment would react to the president’s squabble with the Americans. Without a security agreement, Congress might well decide not to provide the $4 billion a year that the United States has promised to finance Afghanistan’s forces.
A United States official here, also speaking on the condition of anonymity as a matter of policy, said: “Misleading statements like this do not help to finalize the bilateral security agreement as soon as possible this year, which is essential to the future of Afghanistan and the confidence of the Afghan people.” While Mr. Karzai is a member of the country’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, the leadership of the country’s security services is dominated by non-Pashtuns. “How they react, in whole or part, one way or the other, will be key to the stability of the country,” the Western official said.
But Afghan officials did not back down. “On this incident, the local people’s and local officials’ accounts differ from the one the U.S. military gives,” Mr. Faizi, the spokesman for Mr. Karzai, said Saturday. He added that American officials had always been quick to deny that victims of such raids were civilians, and had been confirmed by an investigation by the Nangarhar governor, Mualavi Ataullah Ludin.

Alissa J. Rubin, Jawad Sukhanyar and Habib Zahori contributed reporting.

Mr. Ludin, interviewed by telephone, said that the Nangarhar raid was led by American Special Forces troops, and that the only Afghans present were mercenaries.
Mr. Faizi added that this raid was another example of why the Afghans no longer trusted the Americans, because it violated an agreement limiting raids on Afghan homes to Afghan-led missions, initiated at Afghan request.
He said Mr. Karzai would use his speech on the final day of the loya jirga, which was scheduled for Sunday, to explain his position on delaying the signing.

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.