Obama, Karzai agree: It’s time to wind down war

JULIE PACE

ROBERT BURNS

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Uneasy allies, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama and Afghan Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai demon­strated Fri­day they could agree on one big idea: After 11 years of war, the time is right for U.S. forces to let Afghans do their own fight­ing. U.S. and coali­tion forces will take a bat­tle­field back seat by spring and, by impli­ca­tion, go home in larger num­bers soon thereafter.

“It will be a his­toric moment,” Obama declared.

In a White House meet­ing billed as a chance to take stock of a war that now ranks as America’s longest, Obama and Karzai agreed to accel­er­ate their timetable for putting the Afghanistan army in the lead com­bat role nation­wide. It will hap­pen this spring instead of sum­mer — a shift that looks small but looms larger in the debate over how quickly to bring U.S. troops home and whether some should stay after com­bat ends in 2014.

The two lead­ers also agreed that the Afghan gov­ern­ment would be given full con­trol of deten­tion cen­ters and detainees. They did not reach agree­ment on an equally sticky issue: whether any U.S. troops remain­ing after 2014 would be granted immu­nity from pros­e­cu­tion under Afghan law. Immu­nity is a U.S. demand that the Afghans have resisted, say­ing they want assur­ances on other things — like author­ity over detainees — first.

At a joint news con­fer­ence with Karzai in the White House East Room, Obama said he was not yet ready to decide the pace of U.S. troop with­drawals between now and Decem­ber 2014. That is the tar­get date set by NATO and the Afghan gov­ern­ment for the inter­na­tional com­bat mis­sion to end. There are now 66,000 U.S. troops there.

Obama’s mes­sage was clear: The Afghans must now show they are capa­ble of stand­ing on their own.

“By the end of next year, 2014, the tran­si­tion will be com­plete — Afghans will have full respon­si­bil­ity for their secu­rity, and this war will come to a respon­si­ble end,” he said, not­ing that more than 2,000 Amer­i­cans have died since the war began in Octo­ber 2001.

The Afghan army and police now have 352,000 in train­ing or on duty, although that num­ber is viewed by many as unsus­tain­able because the gov­ern­ment is almost entirely reliant on inter­na­tional aid to pay the bills.

Some pri­vate secu­rity ana­lysts — and some in the Pen­ta­gon — worry that pulling out to quickly will leave Afghanistan vul­ner­a­ble to col­lapse. In a worst-case sce­nario, that could allow the Tal­iban to regain power and revert to the role they played in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as pro­tec­tors of al-Qaida ter­ror­ists bent on strik­ing the U.S.

Many Amer­i­cans, how­ever, are weary of the war and skep­ti­cal of any claim that Afghanistan is worth more U.S. blood.

In a reflec­tion of the dimin­ish­ing sup­port in Con­gress for a robust U.S. role in Afghanistan, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a mem­ber of the Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee, sent a let­ter to Obama on Fri­day urg­ing him to sig­nif­i­cantly reduce the num­ber of Amer­i­can troops in the region and bring Amer­i­can forces home as quickly as possible.

“Our troops have accom­plished their mis­sion: Osama bin Laden is dead, extrem­ist net­works in Afghanistan have been dis­rupted so that they are no longer a cred­i­ble inter­na­tional threat and the Afghan secu­rity forces have received train­ing and equip­ment for nearly a decade,” Manchin wrote. “It is now time to let Afghanistan deter­mine its own future.”

Obama and Karzai also have to decide whether a resid­ual U.S. force will remain after 2014 to pre­vent al-Qaida from re-establishing a sub­stan­tial pres­ence in Afghanistan and to con­tinue train­ing and advis­ing Afghan forces. U.S. com­man­ders have rec­om­mended that 6,000 to 15,000 U.S. troops remain for those pur­poses, but the White House seems to believe the true need is closer to 3,000 — or pos­si­bly even zero.

Asked at the news con­fer­ence about a poten­tial post-2104 U.S. mil­i­tary pres­ence, 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.”

Although it’s not widely rec­og­nized in the U.S., Amer­i­can forces have greatly scaled back their com­bat role already. In a joint state­ment, Obama and Karzai said Afghan forces now lead more than 80 per­cent of com­bat oper­a­tions, and by next month they will be in the lead in secu­rity for nearly 90 per­cent of the Afghan population.

Once the Afghans take the lead across the coun­try this spring, “most uni­lat­eral U.S. com­bat oper­a­tions should end, with U.S. forces pulling back their patrols from Afghan vil­lages,” the lead­ers said in a joint state­ment. They added that this puts greater impor­tance on pro­vid­ing the Afghans “appro­pri­ate equip­ment and enablers,” although they made no men­tion of spe­cific new agree­ments to equip the Afghan army or police.

“Start­ing this spring our troops will have a dif­fer­ent mis­sion: train­ing, advis­ing and assist­ing Afghan forces,” Obama said.

He added later that even in a backup role he could not rule out that U.S. troops could be drawn into combat.

“The envi­ron­ment is going to still be very dan­ger­ous,” Obama said. But he empha­sized that the main role of U.S. forces start­ing this spring will be sup­port, such as train­ing and advising.

Karzai said he was pleased by the agree­ment, in part because it means that by spring there will be no for­eign troops in Afghan vil­lages. That implies an end to a U.S.-led pro­gram in which U.S. spe­cial oper­a­tions forces have moved into rural vil­lages in small num­bers to qui­etly build the begin­nings of local resis­tance to the Taliban.

In their state­ment the lead­ers said they dis­cussed the pos­si­bil­ity of a con­tin­ued U.S. troop pres­ence beyond Decem­ber 2014, when the U.S. and allied com­bat mis­sion is to end. But they did not set­tle on any specifics.

Friday’s meet­ing was the first between Obama and Karzai since November’s U.S. pres­i­den­tial election.

Posted by AP News on Jan 11 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.