Officials: US might leave no troops in Afghanistan

ROBERT BURNS

AP National Secu­rity Writer

WASHINGTON — The Obama admin­is­tra­tion gave the first explicit sig­nal Tues­day that it might leave no troops in Afghanistan after Decem­ber 2014, an option that defies the Pentagon’s view that thou­sands of troops may be needed to keep a lid on al-Qaida and to strengthen Afghan forces.

“The U.S. does not have an inher­ent objec­tive of ‘X’ num­ber of troops in Afghanistan,” said Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national secu­rity adviser. “We have an objec­tive of mak­ing sure there is no safe haven for al-Qaida in Afghanistan and mak­ing sure that the Afghan gov­ern­ment has a secu­rity force that is suf­fi­cient to ensure the sta­bil­ity of the Afghan government.”

The U.S. now has 66,000 troops in Afghanistan, down from a peak of about 100,000 as recently as 2010. The U.S. and its NATO allies agreed in Novem­ber 2010 that they would with­draw all their com­bat troops by the end of 2014, but they have yet to decide what future mis­sions will be nec­es­sary and how many troops they would require.

At stake is the risk of Afghanistan’s col­lapse and a return to the chaos of the 1990s that enabled the Tal­iban to seize power and pro­vide a haven for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida net­work. Fewer than 100 al-Qaida fight­ers are believed to remain in Afghanistan, although a larger num­ber are just across the bor­der in Pak­istani sanctuaries.

Defense Sec­re­tary Leon Panetta has said he fore­sees a need for a U.S. coun­tert­er­ror­ism force in Afghanistan beyond 2014, plus a con­tin­gent to train Afghan forces. He is believed to favor an option that would keep about 9,000 troops in the country.

Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials in recent days have said they are con­sid­er­ing a range of options for a resid­ual U.S. troop pres­ence of as few as 3,000 and as many as 15,000, with the num­ber linked to a spe­cific set of military-related mis­sions like hunt­ing down terrorists.

Asked in a con­fer­ence call with reporters whether zero was now an option, Rhodes said, “That would be an option we would consider.”

His state­ment could be inter­preted as part of an admin­is­tra­tion nego­ti­at­ing strat­egy. On Fri­day Afghan Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai is sched­uled to meet Pres­i­dent Barack Obama at the White House to dis­cuss ways of fram­ing an endur­ing part­ner­ship beyond 2014.

The two are at odds on numer­ous issues, includ­ing a U.S. demand that any Amer­i­can troops who would remain in Afghanistan after the com­bat mis­sion ends be granted immu­nity from pros­e­cu­tion under Afghan law. Karzai has resisted, while empha­siz­ing his need for large-scale U.S. sup­port to main­tain an effec­tive secu­rity force after 2014.

In announc­ing last month in Kabul that he had accepted Obama’s invi­ta­tion to visit this week, Karzai made plain his objectives.

“Give us a good army, a good air force and a capa­bil­ity to project Afghan inter­ests in the region,” Karzai said, and he would gladly rec­i­p­ro­cate by eas­ing the path to legal immu­nity for U.S. troops.

Karzai is sched­uled to meet Thurs­day with Panetta at the Pen­ta­gon and with Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton at the State Department.

With­out explic­itly men­tion­ing immu­nity for U.S. troops, Obama’s top White House mil­i­tary adviser on Afghanistan, Doug Lute, told reporters Tues­day that the Afghans will have to give the U.S. cer­tain “author­i­ties” if it wants U.S. troops to remain.

“As we know from our Iraq expe­ri­ence, if there are no author­i­ties granted by the sov­er­eign state, then there’s not room for a follow-on U.S. mil­i­tary mis­sion,” Lute said. He was refer­ring to 2011 nego­ti­a­tions with Iraq that ended with no agree­ment to grant legal immu­nity to U.S. troops who would have stayed to help train Iraqi forces. As a result, no U.S. troops remain in Iraq.

David Barno, a for­mer com­man­der of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and now a senior fel­low at the Cen­ter for a New Amer­i­can Secu­rity, wrote ear­lier this week that vig­or­ous debate has been under way inside the admin­is­tra­tion on a “min­i­mal­ist approach” for post-2014 Afghanistan.

In an opin­ion piece for ForeignPolicy.com on Mon­day, Barno said the “zero option” was less than opti­mal but “not nec­es­sar­ily an unten­able one.” With­out what he called the sta­bi­liz­ing influ­ence of U.S. troops, Barno cau­tioned that Afghanistan could “slip back into chaos.”

Rhodes said Obama is focused on two main out­comes in Afghanistan: ensur­ing that the coun­try does not revert to being the al-Qaida haven it was prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and get­ting the gov­ern­ment to the point where it can defend itself.

“That’s what guides us, and that’s what causes us to look for dif­fer­ent poten­tial troop num­bers — or not hav­ing poten­tial troops in the coun­try,” Rhodes said.

He pre­dicted that Obama and Karzai would come to no con­crete con­clu­sions on inter­na­tional mil­i­tary mis­sions in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and he said it likely would be months before Obama decides how many U.S. troops — if any — he wants to keep there.

Rhodes said Obama remains com­mit­ted to fur­ther reduc­ing the U.S. mil­i­tary pres­ence this year, although the pace of that with­drawal will not be decided for a few months. Last year the U.S. mil­i­tary pulled 23,000 troops out of Afghanistan on Obama’s orders.

Posted by AP News on Jan 9 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.