Obama on Afghan: Leave on time, no ‘perfect’ end

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama speaks at a news con­fer­ence at the NATO Sum­mit in Chicago, Mon­day. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato)

ANNE GEARAN, BEN FELLER

Asso­ci­ated Press

CHICAGO — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama and lead­ers around the globe locked in place an Afghanistan exit path Mon­day that will still keep their troops fight­ing and dying there for two more years, acknowl­edg­ing there never will be point at which they can say, “This is all done. This is perfect.”

Obama, pre­sid­ing over a 50-nation war coali­tion sum­mit in his home­town, summed up the mood of all the nations by say­ing the Afghanistan that will be left behind will be sta­ble enough for them to depart — good enough after a decade of war— but still loaded with troubles.

The war that began in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will fin­ish at the end of 2014.

“I don’t think there’s ever going to be an opti­mal point where we say, ‘This is all done. This is per­fect. This is just the way we wanted it,’” Obama said as the NATO sum­mit closed. “This is a process, and it’s some­times a messy process.”

Obama never spoke of victory.

Afghan forces for the first time will take over the lead of the com­bat mis­sion by the mid­dle of 2013, a mile­stone moment in a long, costly tran­si­tion of con­trol. Even in a backup role, U.S. forces and all the rest will face sur­prise attacks and bomb­ings until the war’s end.

Wary of cre­at­ing a vac­uum in a volatile region, the nations also promised a last­ing part­ner­ship with Afghanistan, mean­ing many years of con­tribut­ing tax dol­lars, per­son­nel and polit­i­cal cap­i­tal after the end of their sol­diers’ com­bat. The United States has already cut its own deal with Afghanistan along those lines, includ­ing a pro­vi­sion that allows U.S. mil­i­tary train­ers and spe­cial forces to remain in Afghanistan after the war closes.

In an esca­lat­ing election-year envi­ron­ment, Obama was as at the cen­ter of the action in Chicago, beam­ing and boast­ing about the city’s per­for­mance in host­ing the event. Noisy pro­test­ers loaded the city’s streets at times, which Obama called just the kind of free expres­sion NATO defends.

Ten­sions with Pak­istan under­mined some of the chore­o­graphed unity. Pak­istan has not yet agreed to end the clo­sure of key tran­sit routes into Afghanistan — retal­i­a­tion for Amer­i­can airstrikes that acci­den­tally killed 24 Pak­istani sol­diers months ago — and the issue hung over the summit.

Obama had no offi­cial talks with Pak­istani Pres­i­dent Asif Ali Zardari, although the two chat­ted briefly. Obama spoke of progress on the stand­off and with Zardari over­all, but he added: “I don’t want to paper over real chal­lenges there. There’s no doubt that there have been tensions.”

On Afghanistan, led by Obama, the part­ners are in essence stay­ing the course. They stuck with a time­line long estab­lished and under­scored that there will be no second-guessing the deci­sion about when to leave.

Since 2010, they have been plan­ning to fin­ish the war at the end of 2014, even as moves by nations such as France to pull com­bat troops out early have tested the strength of the coali­tion. The shift to have Afghan forces take the lead of the com­bat mis­sion next year has also been expected. Lead­ers pre­sented it as a sig­nif­i­cant turn­ing point in the war.

It will be “the moment when through­out Afghanistan peo­ple can look out and see their own troops and police step­ping up to the chal­lenge,” said the NATO chief, Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

What the world is poised to leave behind is an Afghanistan still rid­dled with poverty, cor­rup­tion and polit­i­cal instability.

Yet, out of money and patience, the U.S.-led part­ner­ship said it is con­fi­dent Afghanistan will be sta­ble and pre­pared enough to at least be able to pro­tect itself — and, in turn, pre­vent its ter­ri­tory from becom­ing a launch­ing pad for inter­na­tional terrorism.

It is time, Obama said, to “respon­si­bly bring this war to an end.”

British Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron said the lead­ers were “mak­ing a deci­sive and endur­ing com­mit­ment to the long-term future of Afghanistan. The mes­sage to the Afghan peo­ple is that we will not desert them. And the mes­sage to the insur­gency is equally clear: You can­not win on the bat­tle­field. You should stop fight­ing and start talking.”

The polit­i­cal stakes are high for the U.S. pres­i­dent, who will go before vot­ers in Novem­ber with tens of thou­sands more troops in Afghanistan than when we took office. His empha­sis will remain that he is method­i­cally wind­ing down the war after clos­ing out the one in Iraq; U.S. vot­ers des­per­ate for bet­ter eco­nomic times have long stopped approv­ing of the war mission.

NATO said it will keep pro­vid­ing “long-term polit­i­cal and prac­ti­cal sup­port” to Afghanistan after 2014 but added: “This will not be a com­bat mission.”

Despite the size of the coali­tion, the war remains a United States-dominated effort.

The U.S. has 90,000 of the 130,000 for­eign forces in the war. Obama has pledged to shrink that to 68,000 by the end of Sep­tem­ber but has offered no details on the with­drawal pace after that, other than to say it will be gradual.

The fight­ing alliance called nego­ti­a­tion the key to end­ing the insur­gency in Afghanistan, but avoided men­tion­ing the Tal­iban by name. The insur­gents walked away from U.S.-led talks in March, and urged the NATO nations to fol­low the lead of France in pledg­ing to remove com­bat forces ahead of schedule.

The alliance agreed on a fundrais­ing goal to under­write the Afghan armed forces after the inter­na­tional fight­ing forces depart. The force of about 230,000 would cost about $4.1 bil­lion annu­ally — the bulk of it paid by the United States and coun­tries that have not been part of the fight­ing force. U.S. and British offi­cials said dur­ing the sum­mit that pledges total about $1 bil­lion a year so far and that fundrais­ing is on track to make up the rest.

Posted by AP News on May 21 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.