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| Written by Michael Tennant Saturday, 02 October 2010 13:20 President Barack Obama may have publicly stated that U.S. troops will begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011, but according to reporter Bob Woodward, both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus have other ideas. The Huffington Post reports that Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, portrays Gates and Petraeus as anticipating — in Gates’s case, perhaps even desiring — a long-term U.S. presence in the “graveyard of empires.” Huffington Post writer Marcus Baram recounts a recent incident that Woodward describes in his book: During a dinner hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Afghan President Hamid Karzai in May, Gates reminded the group that he still feels guilty for his role in the first President Bush’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, according to [Woodward]. And to express his commitment to not letting down the country again, he emphasized: “We’re not leaving Afghanistan prematurely,” Gates finally said. “In fact, we’re not ever leaving at all.” Woodward notes that the group was shocked by the blunt comment: “At least one stunned participant put down his fork. Another wrote it down, verbatim, in his notes.” Even though the communist threat to the Afghans had abated by 1989, Gates just couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the Afghans to run their own country. Now that he’s in charge of the Defense Department, he has another opportunity to prevent a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and he apparently intends to take advantage of it. Baram notes that Gates “could be referring to that small contingency force” that Obama supposedly wants to leave behind after the rest of the troops have been withdrawn; but even if that is what he means by “we’re not leaving at all,” it’s still an indication that the U.S. government intends to be intervening in Afghanistan indefinitely. No wonder Gates was held over from the George W. Bush administration: He’s a perfect point man for the U.S. imperium beloved of both major political parties. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has also gone on the record with his belief that the Afghanistan occupation could last at least another decade, UPI reported on September 14. Woodward, Baram reports, quotes Petraeus, speaking of a multigenerational occupation: “You have to recognize that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.” The Pentagon, then, is clearly on the side of a very long-term, if not permanent, commitment of U.S. forces to Afghanistan, and Obama seems unwilling to assert his authority as commander-in-chief to prevent such a commitment. Whether this is a result of his belief in the interventionist project, his indecisiveness, or a cold political calculation is hard to say; quite possibly it is some of each. During his presidential campaign Obama referred to Afghanistan as “the right battlefield” in the Global War on Terror (as opposed to Iraq) and pledged to send more troops to that country, which he did shortly after assuming office. Yet, as The New American reported on September 22, Woodward recounts a 2009 meeting on Afghanistan in which Obama flatly stated, “I’m not doing 10 years. I’m not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars.” Obama would later, according to Woodward, insist that “there is no wiggle room” when it comes to withdrawing from Afghanistan. At the same time, his reasons for desiring a quick withdrawal appear to be more political than principled. Baram writes that when Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked Obama about his July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, Obama, according to Woodward, replied: “Well, if you’d asked me that question, what I would say is, ‘We’re going to start leaving.’ I have to say that. I can’t let this be a war without end, and I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.... And people at home don’t want to hear we’re going to be there for ten years.” The upshot of all this is that while Obama dithers about what to do in Afghanistan, trying to figure out what his own position is and which way the political winds are blowing, the military gains the upper hand, or at least an equal hand. Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com described this as “the rise of the generals as an almost co-equal force with the President,” which he termed “the most ominous development ... of the post-9/11 political atmosphere.” Indeed, history demonstrates that when the military gains primacy in any political system, little good follows. There is a reason the Founding Fathers put the U.S. military under civilian control. With the military having largely loosed itself from the President’s, as well as Congress’s, control, what is to prevent Gates and Petraeus from having their way? The United States may very well be stuck in Afghanistan for decades, just as she still has troops in Korea, Japan, and Germany long after the conflicts involving those countries have passed. Empire has been the downfall of many formerly free republics; Gibbon would have recognized 2010 America all too well. |
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| Air Force Times By Karen Jowers - Staff writer Posted : Wednesday Oct 6, 2010 13:39:54 EDT The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan has given the green light to bring fast food and other concessions back to Afghanistan. “These quality-of-life programs remain important to soldiers for stress relief and therefore enhancing military readiness,” Gen. David Petraeus wrote in an Oct. 4 order. The ultimate goal of restoring these concessions to Afghanistan, he wrote, is “boosting residents’ morale on U.S. bases.” Information was not immediately available from Army and Air Force Exchange Service officials on a timeline for returning the concessions to Afghanistan, once commanders request that specific concessions be reopened. The order rescinds a closure order issued Feb. 3 by former Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who directed 50 AAFES concessionaires to close within 90 days following a review of morale, welfare and recreation activities within the war zone. “MWR should never be the distracter that changes the focus of the mission,” McChrystal wrote in his order, which he described as an effort “to reduce the MWR/QOL [quality of life] footprint” in the Afghanistan theater of operations. In his new order, Petraeus noted that AAFES concessions must be “right-sized and tailored for an expeditionary force in order to ensure that they do not become distractions to the mission.” Prior to McChrystal’s order, AAFES operated 141 eateries and shops in Afghanistan. After the May closures, 84 remained. Among the 57 closed were Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Popeyes restaurants, as well as new-car sales offices, jewelry, perfume and souvenir shops. Petraeus reiterated in his Oct. 4 order that exchange concessions operate in contingency environments at the request of the combatant commander and subordinate commands. “It is a unit commander’s decision, driven by space and support, to determine if and where these facilities would reopen,” he wrote. As before, concession contractors transport equipment and supplies at their own expense through a commercial entity. |
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| by TomDispatch on October 21, 2010 Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com As we know from a single April 19, 2003 New York Times piece, the Pentagon arrived in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq preparing for a long stay. They already had at least four mega-military bases on the drawing boards as they entered the country (all subsequently built). “Enduring camps” they decided to call them, rather than the dicier “permanent bases.” In the end, hundreds of bases were constructed in Iraq, from the tiniest combat outposts to monster installations, to the tune of untold billions of dollars. In the end, hundreds are now being left behind to be stripped, looted, or occupied by the Iraqi military. From Baghdad, the British Guardian’s correspondent Martin Chulov recently reported that part of the price Nouri al-Maliki seems to have negotiated (in Tehran, not Washington) to retain his prime ministership may involve not letting the Pentagon keep even a single monster base in Iraq after 2011. This was evidently demanded by former U.S. nemesis, rebel cleric, and now “kingmaker” Muqtada al-Sadr, whose movement controls more than 10% of the votes in Iraq’s new parliament. That can’t make the Pentagon, or the U.S. high command, happy – and the Obama administration is already kicking. However this ends for Washington, barely based or baseless in Iraq, surely this was not the way it was supposed to happen, not when it was still “mission accomplished” time and it seemed so self-evident that American military power, obviously unchallengeable, would be deeply entrenched on either side of Iran until “regime change” occurred there. If you want a measure of how far the U.S. has “fallen” in Iraq, it now has only 21 “burn pits” there — places at U.S. bases where waste of all sorts is incinerated, regularly spewing smoke filled with toxic emissions into the air to the detriment of American soldiers (and undoubtedly local Iraqis as well). On the other hand, according to a Government Accountability Office report, there are now 221 such pits in Afghanistan and “more coming.” Put another way, even as America’s baseworld in Iraq dwindles, there seems to be no learning curve in Washington. As Nick Turse suggests in his most recent TomDispatch report, in Afghanistan we seem to be heading down the Iraq path on bases with a special ardor. More than nine years after our “successful” invasion, billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are still flowing into constructing and upgrading the massive base structure in that country — and yet, there are never enough of them. In a recent Wall Street Journal piece on an unexpected surge of Taliban successes in northern Afghanistan, Army Colonel Bill Burleson, commander of the 10th Mountain Division, among the relatively modest U.S. forces in the northern part of that country, is quoted as saying somewhat desperately of Taliban gains in the region: “In order to deny that terrain to the enemy you’d have to have people all over Afghanistan in combat outposts.” Good point, Colonel. Why stop now? Tom Englehardt Digging in for the long haul in Afghanistan How permanent are America’s Afghan bases? By Nick Turse Some go by names steeped in military tradition like Leatherneck and Geronimo. Many sound fake-tough, like Ramrod, Lightning, Cobra, and Wolverine. Some display a local flavor, like Orgun-E, Howz-e-Madad, and Kunduz. All, however, have one thing in common: they are U.S. and allied forward operating bases, also known as FOBs. They are part of a base-building surge that has left the countryside of Afghanistan dotted with military posts, themselves expanding all the time, despite the drawdown of forces promised by President Obama beginning in July 2011. The U.S. military does not count the exact number of FOBs it has built in Afghanistan, but forward operating bases and other facilities of similar or smaller size make up the bulk of U.S. outposts there. Of the hundreds of U.S. bases in the country, according to Gary Younger, a U.S. public affairs officer with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), 77% house units of battalion size (approximately 500 to 1,000 troops) or smaller; 20% are occupied by units smaller than a Brigade Combat Team (about 3,000 troops); and 3% are huge bases, occupied by units larger than a Brigade Combat Team, that generally boast large-scale military command-and-control capabilities and all the amenities of Anytown, USA. Younger tells TomDispatch that ISAF does not centrally track its base construction and up-grading work, nor the money spent on such projects. However, Major General Kenneth S. Dowd — the Director of Logistics for U.S. Central Command for three years before leaving the post in June — offered this partial account of the ongoing Afghan base build-up in the September/October issue of Army Sustainment, the official logistics journal of the Army: “Military construction projects scheduled for completion over the next 12 months will deliver 4 new runways, ramp space for 8 C−17 transports, and parking for 50 helicopters and 24 close air support and 26 intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. This represents roughly one-third of the airfield paving projects currently funded in the Afghanistan theater of operations. Additional minor construction plans called for the construction of over 12 new FOBs and expansion of 18 existing FOBs.” If Dowd offered the barest sketch of some of the projects planned or underway, a TomDispatch analysis of little-noticed U.S. government records and publications, including U.S. Army and Army Corps of Engineers contracting documents and construction-bid solicitations issued over the last five months, fills in the picture. The documents reveal plans for large-scale, expensive Afghan base expansions of every sort and a military that is expecting to pursue its building boom without letup well into the future. These facts-on-the-ground indicate that, whatever timelines for phased withdrawal may be issued in Washington, the U.S. military is focused on building up, not drawing down, in Afghanistan. Jobs on FOBs A typical forward operating base set to undergo expansion is FOB Salerno, a post located near the Afghan city of Khost, not far from the Pakistani border. According to documents from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, plans are in the works for an expansion of that base’s fuel facilities. Estimated to cost $10 million to $25 million, these upgrades will increase fuel storage capacity to one million gallons to enhance land and air operations, and may not be completed for a year and a half; that is, until well into 2012. In June, work was completed on a new, nearly $12 million runway at Forward Operating Base Shank, near the city of Puli Alam in Logar Province, south of Kabul. The base was formerly accessible only by road and helicopter, but its new 1.4-mile-long airstrip can now accommodate large Lockheed C-130 Hercules and Boeing C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft, enabling ever larger numbers of personnel to be deployed to the site. Not surprisingly, government documents released in August show that FOB Shank is also set for a major boost in troop housing. Already home to approximately 4,500 military personnel, it will be adding a new two-story barracks, constructed of containerized housing units known as “relocatable buildings” or RLBs, to accommodate 1,100 more troops. Support facilities, access roads, parking areas, new utilities, and other infrastructure required to sustain the housing complex will also be installed for an estimated $5 million to $10 million. In addition, the Army Corps of Engineers just began seeking contractors to add 452,000 square feet of airfield parking space at the base. It’s meant for Special Operations Forces’ helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. New aircraft maintenance facilities and 80,000 square feet more of taxiways will also be built at the cost of another $10 million to $25 million. Documents reveal that this sort of expansion is now going on at a remarkably rapid pace all over the country. For instance, major expansions of infrastructure to support helicopter operations, including increased apron space, taxiways, and tarmac for parking, servicing, loading, and unloading are planned for facilities like FOB Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan Province, FOB Dwyer, a Marine base in Helmand Province, and FOB Sharana, a Paktika Province base near the Pakistani border, where the Army also announced plans for the construction of an ammunition supply facility, with storage space for one million pounds of munitions, and related infrastructure. In late August, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reported that construction was slated to begin on at least three $100 million base projects, including FOB Dwyer, that were not “expected to be completed until the latter half of 2011.” In addition to enhancing helicopter operations infrastructure, plans were also announced for the construction of a new, large-scale wastewater treatment facility at Dwyer, a project estimated to cost another $10 million to $25 million and, like so much of what is now being built by the U.S. military in the backlands of Afghanistan, it is not expected to be completed and put fully into use until well into the second half of 2011, if not later — that is, after President Obama’s theoretical due date for beginning to lessen the mission in that country. And whenever you stumble upon a document indicating that work of a certain sort is taking place at one FOB, you can be sure that, sooner or later, you will find similar work at other FOBs. In this case, for example, FOB Frontenac in Kandahar Province and Tarin Kowt, north of Kandahar, are, like Dwyer, slated to receive new wastewater plants. Much of this work may sound mundane, but the scale of it isn’t. Typical is another of the bases identified by Pincus, FOB Shindand in western Afghanistan, which is to receive, among other things, new security fencing, new guard towers, and new underground electrical lines. And that’s just to begin the list of enhancements at Shindand, including earthen berms for four 200,000-gallon “expeditionary fuel bladders and a concrete pad suitable for parking and operating fourteen R-11 refueling vehicles” — tanker trucks with a 6,000-gallon capacity — as well as new passenger processing and cargo handling facilities (an $18 million contract) and an expansion of helicopter facilities (another $25 million to $50 million). Multiply this, FOB by FOB, the length and breadth of Afghanistan, and you have a building program fit for a long war. Permanent Bases? This building boom has hardly been confined to FOBs. Construction and expansion work at bases far larger than FOBs, including the mega-bases at Bagram and Kandahar, is ongoing, often at a startling pace. The Army, for example, has indicated it plans to build a 24,000 square-foot, $10-million command-and-control facility as well as a “Joint Defense Operations Center” with supporting amenities — from water storage tanks to outdoor landscaping — at Bagram Air Base. At bustling Kandahar Air Field, the military has offered contracts for a variety of upgrades, including a $28.5 million deal for the construction of an outdoor shelter for fighter aircraft, as well as new operations and maintenance facilities and more apron space, among a host of other improvements. In June, Noah Shachtman of Wired.com’s Danger Room reported on the Army’s plans to expand its Special Operations headquarters at Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan and cited documents indicating that construction would include a “communications building, Tactical Operations Center, training facility, medical aid station, Vehicle Maintenance Facility… dining facility, laundry facility, and a kennel to support working dogs.” A contract for that work, worth $30 million, was awarded at the end of September. Similarly, according to a recent article in the Marine Corps Times, Camp Leatherneck, which expanded in late 2009 from a 660-acre facility to 1,550 acres, or approximately 2.4 square miles, is slated to add three new gyms to the one already there, as well as a chapel complex with three separate buildings (one big enough to accommodate up to 200 people), a second mess hall (capable of serving 4,000 Marines at a time), a new PX housed in a big-top tent, with 10,000 square feet of sales space — the current base facility only has 3,000 square feet — and the installation of a $200 million runway that can accommodate C-5 cargo planes and 747 passenger jets. Despite a pledge from the Obama administration to begin its troop drawdowns next July, this ongoing base-construction splurge, when put together with recent signals from the White House, civilians at the Pentagon, and top military commanders, including Afghan war chief General David Petraeus, suggests that the process may be drawn out over many years. During a recent interview with ABC News Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Martha Raddatz, for instance, Petraeus affirmed the president’s July 2011 timeline, but added a crucial caveat. “It will be a pace that is determined by conditions,” he said. Almost a decade into the Afghan War, he claimed, the U.S. military had “finally gotten the inputs right in Afghanistan.” Raddatz then asked if the “counterinsurgency clock” had just restarted — if, that is, it could be another nine or ten years to achieve success. “Yeah,” replied Petraeus, hastening to add that American soldiers killed there over the previous nine years had not simply died for nothing. “But it is just at this point that we feel that we do have the organizations that we learned in Iraq and from history are necessary for the conduct that this kind of campaign.” The building boom occurring on U.S. bases across Afghanistan and the contracts for future construction being awarded at the moment seem to confirm that, whatever the White House has in mind, the military is operating on something closer to the Petraeus timeline. The new Special Operations base at Mazar-e-Sharif, to take but one of many examples, may not be completed and fully occupied for at least a year and a half. Other construction contracts, not yet even awarded, are expected to take a year or more to complete. And military timelines suggest that, if the Pentagon gets its way, American troop levels may not dip below the numbers present when Obama took office, approximately 36,000 troops, until 2016 or beyond. At the moment, the American people are being offered one story about how the American war in Afghanistan is to proceed, while in Afghanistan their tax dollars are being invested in another trajectory entirely. The question is: How permanent are U.S. bases in Afghanistan? And if they are not meant to be used for a decade or more to come, why is the Pentagon still building as if they were? Recently, the Army sought bids from contractors willing to supply power plants and supporting fuel systems at forward operating bases in Afghanistan for up to five years. Power plants, fuel systems, and the bases on which they are being built are facts on the ground. Such facts carry a weight of their own, and offer a window into U.S. designs in Afghanistan that may be at least as relevant as anything Barack Obama or his aides have been saying about draw-downs, deadlines, or future withdrawal plans. If you want to ask hard questions about America’s Afghan War, start with those bases. Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, has just been published. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. His website is NickTurse.com. Copyright 2010 Nick Turse ShareThis | print this post print this post { 1 comment… read it below or add one } pabelmont October 21, 2010 at 12:03 pm Nevert regret these abandoned bases. One purpose for all those so-expensive bases has been served already: enrichment of Haliburton-like companies that get rich rebuilding what USA has destroyed (Iraqi infrastructure) and building bases for USA armed forces. The USA is about business. That is why we hire mercenaries to replace soldiers (and to replace CIA employees) and why we destroy in order to rebuild, and all those fancy bases and embassies. (How I wish we enriched the MIC at home by building aircraft and bombs and then digging a deep hole and burying them in it, say in Nevada desert. Be so much better for the world and for the natural environment than all this war-making.) |
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| The Times of India AFP, Nov 3, 2010, 08.16pm IST KBR Subcontractors : govWin.com/KBR ? KABUL: The United States is expanding its presence in Afghanistan, announcing on Wednesday a massive expansion of its Kabul embassy and construction of two consulates. Washington's Kabul embassy is already its biggest in the world, with about 1,100 employees, projected to rise to 1,200 by the end of the year, officials said. Hundreds have arrived over the course of this year as part of a "civilian surge" bringing development experts into the country to compliment the military effort already in its 10th year. The United States and NATO have 150,000 troops in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban-led insurgency, following a military surge aimed at speeding an end to the war. The embassy expansion contract was worth 511 million dollars and had been awarded under US law to an American company, ambassador Karl Eikenberry said. Another two contracts, each worth 20 million dollars, had been awarded for the construction of consulates in Herat, the main city in western Afghanistan, and Mazar-I-Sharif in the north, he said. Speaking to a gathering of Afghan officials, Eikenberry said the expansion would enable the United States "to carry out its pledge to maintain into the future its very significant security, government, economic and civil society programmes". He said the projects currently employed 500 Afghans and that "once construction gets underway more than 1,500 Afghan workers will be employed through the completion of the project in summer 2014". |
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| DAWN.com Thu 04 Nov 2010 photo caption: House Republican leader John Boehner addresses the National Republican Congressional Committee Election Night Results Watch event in Washington, DC, on November 2, 2010. An emotional John Boehner, the presumed speaker-elect of the US House of Representatives, told fellow Republicans at the victory party that Americans have sent President Obama message to 'change course'. – Photo by AFP WASHINGTON: Republican lawmakers who now control the US House of Representatives said on Thursday that they would try to prevent President Barack Obama from withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan as he planned. Congressman Buck McKeon, who will now take over the House Armed Services Committee from the Democrats, has also announced his party’s plan for Afghanistan and Iraq. He said that under the Republicans the committee’s top priority would be to continue the US military presence in Afghanistan. Mr McKeon pledged to work directly with Gen David Petraeus, the US commander in Afghanistan, to commit more equipment and resources to the war effort. “America remains a nation at war,” Mr McKeon said in a statement. “More than 150,000 of our sons and daughters are deployed around the globe in the fight against Al Qaeda and its terrorist allies. The top priority of the Armed Services Committee will be to provide those brave fighters the resources and support they need to succeed in their missions and return home safely.” He announced a three-point Republican defence policy: “Ensuring our troops deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the world have the equipment, resources, authorities, training, and time they need to successfully complete their missions and return home; building on the Armed Services Committee’s strong bipartisan tradition of providing our fighters and their families with the resources and support they need; and, investing in the capabilities and force structure needed to protect the United States from tomorrow’s threats, while mandating fiscal responsibility, accountability, and transparency from the Department of Defence.” The Republicans also vowed to adopt a National Defence Authorisation Act for Fiscal Year 2011 to provide more funds for US troops. Upon taking office in 2009, President Obama quickly established Afghanistan as his war, dramatically escalating the US presence there. The Republicans strongly supported him on the issue but disagreed with a plan he announced later to start a gradual withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan from July 2011. “You cannot tell the enemy when you’re leaving, when you’re in warfare, and expect your strategy to prevail,” said Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate. In Tuesday’s midterm elections, the Republicans captured 243 out of 435 seats while 192 went to the Democrats. The Republicans increased their strength in the Senate too, seizing 47 seats. Although the Democrats maintained their majority in the 100-seat Senate by retaining 52 seats, they did so because only 37 seats were up for election. |
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| Agence France-Presse Melbourne, November 07, 2010 First Published: 11:54 IST(7/11/2010) Last Updated: 11:56 IST(7/11/2010) Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the pace of a planned US troop drawdown in Afghanistan next year would be based mainly on conditions on the battlefield rather than "domestic politics" in the United States. Republican lawmakers, who won control of the House of Representatives in US legislative elections on Tuesday, have made clear that they oppose a July 2011 target date for the start of a gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan, warning they will press their case when the new Congress convenes in January. Speaking to reporters aboard his plane before landing in Melbourne for annual security talks with Australia, Gates said the effect of the mid-term elections on the withdrawal plan "remains to be seen." "Partly I think things will depend on our assessment next spring and early summer of how we're doing. I think that will have the biggest impact on the president's decisions in terms of the pacing" of a troop drawdown, Gates said on Saturday. "The administration had always stressed that any reduction in troop levels would be determined by conditions on the ground," he said. He added, "It will be based more on that than domestic politics." The United States has about 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, serving along with some 50,000 non-US coalition forces. President Barack Obama ordered in 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan last year in a bid to turn around the war, but also vowed to start pulling out troops by mid-2011. Senior Republicans strongly oppose the deadline, saying it plays into the hands of the Taliban insurgency. |
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| Cameron Stewart, Paul Kelly | The Australian | November 09, 2010 12:00AM THE US intends to stay in Afghanistan for the long term, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates vowed yesterday. Mr Gates said the US would exert an influence on the country long after the combat troops had left. His comments came as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that next year there would be parts of the war-ravaged country that would once again be under the control of the Afghan government and its own troops rather than US forces. The extent of this transition of power would depend on conditions on the ground and would not be based on a specific timetable. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said he wants Afghan security forces to take responsibility for security in the country by 2014. Speaking at a press conference in Melbourne following the Ausmin security talks between the US and Australia, Mrs Clinton said: "The strategies that we are implementing together (with Australia) in Afghanistan is the right strategy and we are committed to pursuing that strategy and being very conscious of the challenges that it poses to us. "The goal is to be able to transition security to the Afghans themselves starting next year, but that transition will be conditions-based and will be determined as the analysis of our commanders in the field suggest to the civilian leadership in both of our countries. "The progress that we believe is occurring is very challenging, it takes patience, it requires all of us to understand that this is a tough fight that we are in. But we are convinced that starting next year, there will be parts of Afghanistan that will be under the control of the Afghan government and its security forces. We can't tell you when or on what timetable because we will be making those assessments based on the conditions as they occur." Mr Gates said any notion that the US would withdraw from Afghanistan any time soon was mistaken. "We are not getting out," he said. He said that the US would maintain an active presence in Afghanistan long after combat troops had left. "We are all convinced we have to stay in Afghanistan and remain a partner even after most of our troops are gone," he said. "We don't see this as a relationship that ends when the security transition is completed." His comments echo those of Julia Gillard, who said during a parliamentary debate on Afghanistan last month that Australia could be involved in that country for at least another 10 years as military assistance gave way to civil-led aid and development assistance. In relation to negotiations with the Taliban, Mr Gates said there was "broad agreement" that there needed to be a reconciliation process. His personal opinion was that the Taliban needed to see its prospects for success had diminished dramatically and "that they may well lose". "They have to see they are not ultimately going to be successful in taking the country by force," he said. |
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| Listen to the Story Morning Edition [46 sec] * Add to Playlist * Download November 9, 2010 U.S. Defense officials said Monday that Afghanistan should be ready to handle its own security by 2014. TRANSCRIPT MONTAGNE: American troops like Ronald Hank Grider have been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for nine years now. Top U.S. defense officials say they want Afghans to take charge of their own security by the year 2014. That's the target date set by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. And both the U.S. defense secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff say NATO should endorse it. But the man who heads NATO's training mission in Afghanistan, General William Caldwell, says he'll need many more trainers to get the Afghan forces prepared for a handover in just four years. President Obama has said he intends to begin to withdraw troops next July. (Soundbite of music) MONTAGNE: This is NPR News. |
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| The Dallas Morning News 09:18 AM CST on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 McClatchy Newspapers, The Associated Press WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is publicly moving away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize the pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials say. The new policy will be on display next week during a conference of NATO countries in Lisbon, Portugal, three senior officials said. The administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the year when Afghan President Hamid Karzai once said Afghan troops could provide their own security. The Pentagon also has decided not to announce specific dates for handing security responsibility for several Afghan provinces to local officials when it meets with NATO allies. The shift came in part because U.S. officials realized that conditions in Afghanistan were unlikely to allow a speedy withdrawal. But U.S. officials said that a drawdown would still begin in July 2011. "Of course, we are not going to fully transition to the Afghans by July 2011," said one senior administration official. "Right now, we think we can start in 2011 and fully transition sometime in 2014." Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday that the U.S. is open to the idea of keeping troops in Iraq past a deadline to leave next year if that nation asks for it. "We'll stand by," Gates said. "We're ready to have that discussion if and when they want to raise it with us." Gates urged Iraq's political groups to reconcile and agree on a new government after eight months of deadlock. Any request to extend the U.S. military presence in Iraq would have to come from a functioning Iraqi government. It would amend the current agreement under which U.S. troops must leave by the end of 2011. McClatchy Newspapers, The Associated Press |
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| by Meteor Blades | Daily Kos | Wed Nov 10, 2010 at 06:48:03 AM PST Remember that extensive review of U.S. Afghanistan policy that's supposed to be coming next month? It apparently won't be so extensive if the military sources McClatchy reporter Nancy A. Youssef has been talking to are right. Remember those troops that the Obama administration stressed last December are going to start coming out of Afghanistan next July? That deadline is no longer being stressed. Remember that December 2011 deadline for having all U.S. troops out of Iraq? All the troops may not be out by then, according to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. McClatchy reports: The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama's pledge that he'd begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy. The new policy will be on display next week during a conference of NATO countries in Lisbon, Portugal, where the administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the year when Afghan President Hamid Karzai once said Afghan troops could provide their own security, three senior officials told McClatchy, along with others speaking anonymously as a matter of policy. ... What a year ago had been touted as an extensive December review of the strategy now also will be less expansive and will offer no major changes in strategy, the officials told McClatchy. ... On Tuesday, a White House official who spoke with reporters in a conference call arranged to discuss the December review, said the administration might withdraw some troops next July and may hand some communities over to Afghan authorities. But he said a withdrawal from Afghanistan could take "years," depending on the capability of the Afghan national security forces. According to the sources, the choice of de-emphasizing the July deadline was made in part because of what they said is a perception among Pakistani officials that 2011 would mark the beginning of the end of U.S. military action in Afghanistan. This perception has led Pakistan's military to seek a political settlement with the Taliban and reduce its pressure on Taliban infiltrators into Afghanistan. The midterm election losses that put Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives has also reduced pressure on the administration to begin an early withdrawal. The incoming chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon of California, opposes the deadline. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said this week in a press conference in Melbourne, Australia, that U.S. troops would be in Afghanistan a long time, and that a U.S. presence would remain long "after most of our troops are gone." That presence will definitely have to be there a long time if policies such as the one which sends out killer-drones keeps taking the lives of innocent civilians. As Johann Hari wrote last month at the Independent: Is the same thing happening in Pakistan? David Kilcullen is a counter-insurgency expert who worked for General Petraeus in Iraq and now advises the State Department. He has shown that two per cent of the people killed by the robot-planes in Pakistan are jihadis. The remaining 98 per cent are as innocent as the victims of 9/11. He says: "It's not moral." And it gets worse: "Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially as drone strikes have increased." Professor of Middle Eastern history Juan Cole puts it more bluntly: "When you bomb people and kill their family, it pisses them off. They form lifelong grudges... This is not rocket science. If they were not sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qa'ida before, after you bomb the shit out of them, they will be. Creating more radical jihadists increases the perceived "need" for keeping a long-term U.S. presence in the region to kill those new jihadists. The killing of the bystanders around them turns kin and friends into yet more jihadists. Outcome: A never-ending vicious circle tailor-made for the war hawks and their pals in the military-industrial-congressional complex. A fresh flow of jihadists. A fresh flow of cash. Bolstering this is a Congress (on both sides of the aisle) unwilling to object to the puerile rationale that has sent 60,000 fresh U.S. troops into Afghanistan since the Obama administration took over the war it inherited. Meanwhile, Secretary Gates said in a meeting with Malaysian defense officials that the Baghdad government might ask Washington to extend the stay of U.S. troops in Iraq. Those troops are supposed to be home by Christmas 2011. Of course, if the Iraqi government asks them to stay, it would be downright rude to leave, eh? But first there has to be a government in Iraq to do the asking. The neo-conservatives are in retreat, but the empire lives on. |
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| Obama officials moving away from 2011 Afghan date By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama's pledge that he'd begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy. |
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| Posted on Tuesday, November 9, 2010 By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama's pledge that he'd begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy. The new policy will be on display next week during a conference of NATO countries in Lisbon, Portugal, where the administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the year when Afghan President Hamid Karzai once said Afghan troops could provide their own security, three senior officials told McClatchy, along with others speaking anonymously as a matter of policy. The Pentagon also has decided not to announce specific dates for handing security responsibility for several Afghan provinces to local officials and instead intends to work out a more vague definition of transition when it meets with its NATO allies. What a year ago had been touted as an extensive December review of the strategy now also will be less expansive and will offer no major changes in strategy, the officials told McClatchy. So far, the U.S. Central Command, the military division that oversees Afghanistan operations, hasn't submitted any kind of withdrawal order for forces for the July deadline, two of those officials told McClatchy. The shift already has begun privately and came in part because U.S. officials realized that conditions in Afghanistan were unlikely to allow a speedy withdrawal. "During our assessments, we looked at if we continue to move forward at this pace, how long before we can fully transition to the Afghans? And we found that we cannot fully transition to the Afghans by July 2011," said one senior administration official. "So we felt we couldn't focus on July 2011 but the period it will take to make the full transition." Another official said the administration also realized in contacts with Pakistani officials that the Pakistanis had concluded wrongly that July 2011 would mark the beginning of the end of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. That perception, one Pentagon adviser said, has convinced Pakistan's military — which is key to preventing Taliban sympathizers from infiltrating Afghanistan — to continue to press for a political settlement instead of military action. "This administration now understands that it cannot shift Pakistani approaches to safeguarding its interests in Afghanistan with this date being perceived as a walk-away date," the adviser said. Last week's midterm elections also have eased pressure on the Obama administration to begin an early withdrawal. Earlier this year, some Democrats in Congress pressed to cut off funding for Afghanistan operations. With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives beginning in January, however, there'll be less push for a drawdown. The incoming House Armed Services chairman, Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., told Reuters last week that he opposed setting the date. The White House vehemently denies that there is any change in policy. "The president has been crystal clear that we will begin drawing down troops in July of 2011. There is absolutely no change to that policy," said Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman. On Tuesday, a White House official who spoke with reporters in a conference call arranged to discuss the December review, said the administration might withdraw some troops next July and may hand some communities over to Afghan authorities. But he said a withdrawal from Afghanistan could take "years," depending on the capability of the Afghan national security forces. He also said the December review would measure progress in eight areas, though he declined to specify what those are. Congress will get a report by early next year, but Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S.-led international forces in Afghanistan, will not testify. "This is designed to be an inside the administration perspective," he said, adding it will "set the policymaking calendar" for the Obama administration's first six months of next year. De-emphasizing deadlines also allows the administration greater flexibility in responding to conditions in Afghanistan, officials said. While the Taliban are facing increasing coalition airstrikes, they have no driving incentive to negotiate with an unpopular government. Officials here quietly worry that while they, too, are seeing some drops in violence and the Taliban's hold in pockets of Afghanistan, those limited improvements aren't leading to better governance. A U.N. report issued in August showed that civilian casualties rose 31 percent during the first half of the year compared with the previous year, 76 percent were caused by the Taliban, it said. So far, more than 400 U.S. troops have been killed this year. Many officials here privately worry that talk of a withdrawal without results will cost the military credibility, with Americans and Afghans alike. "What we ultimately need in Afghanistan is good governance," said one senior military officer. "Right now there is a gap" between security gains and governance. Christopher Preble, the director for foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, said he's not surprised that the scope of the December review has narrowed and that Obama administration officials are no longer highlighting the July 2011 date. "The very players who were arguing so strenuously for a deepening of our involvement in Afghanistan a year ago are unlikely to now declare that their earlier recommendations were faulty," he said. (Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay contributed to this article.) MORE FROM MCCLATCHY Afghan soldier turns weapon on American troops, kills 2 Commentary: Violence takes a turn to the north Afghan election panel reports new evidence of serious fraud McClatchy's Checkpoint Kabul blog Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/09/1034...l#ixzz14umRMK6q |
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| Posted on Wednesday, 11.10.10 By WARREN P. STROBEL McClatchy Newspapers KABUL, Afghanistan -- A delegation of four U.S. senators, asserting that the U.S. counterinsurgency is making headway in Afghanistan, heightened pressure Wednesday on President Barack Obama to abandon his pledge that the United States would begin withdrawing troops in July 2011, a deadline that seems increasingly wobbly. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Obama was "wrong to set the date of July, mid-2011," to begin a phased withdrawal of roughly 100,000 U.S. troops. He said the president should unequivocally state that any U.S. pullback would be based on conditions in the country. "He hasn't done that to my satisfaction," McCain said. Offering a different perspective, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, told reporters that the 2011 date should not be a focal point. "A better date to think about is 2014," he said, when Afghan President Hamid Karzai has proposed that Afghanistan take control of its own security. In a story that appeared in Wednesday publications, McClatchy Newspapers reported that the White House plans to de-emphasize the July 2011 date as the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal in hopes, in part, of convincing Pakistan's military that the U.S. will not soon abandon its fight against the Taliban. Obama announced that the U.S. would begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011 in a speech a year ago at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. The date has been controversial from the beginning, and McClatchy Newspapers reported that senior U.S. officials say that the administration is now trying to focus attention on 2014. On Wednesday, Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said there's been no change in policy. "The president has been crystal clear that we will begin drawing down troops in July of 2011. There is absolutely no change to that policy," Vietor said in a statement. A White House official who briefed reporters Tuesday about an upcoming review of progress in Afghanistan, however, carefully avoided the word "withdrawal" when asked whether "the president will be able to meet the date of July 2011 for starting pulling out the troops." "The president has been clear that we will begin, in July '11, a responsible transition to Afghan security forces, from American combat forces to Afghan security forces," the official responded. "What's not clear, what has not yet been prescribed, is the pace of that transition. And the degree to which - how far it will go, how fast." Under the conditions of the briefing, the official cannot be identified. At a meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia, last weekend, Undersecretary of Defense Michelle Flournoy also avoided the use of "withdrawal" in discussing administration plans for Afghanistan next year. "July 2011, from the U.S. perspective, is the end of the surge," she said at a security conference sponsored by the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based policy institute. "It is the beginning of a very careful, conditions-based process of gradual transition to Afghan-led responsibility for security. You will see the forces change over time, but I think everyone is signed up to President Karzai's goal of having lead responsibility in 2014." The senators' assertion of progress in the Afghan war was based on briefings here with U.S. generals, including Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of allied forces in Afghanistan. Petraeus and the other commanders argue that a reinforced counterinsurgency strategy is working but needs more time than some in Washington are willing to give it. Lieberman said Petraeus told the delegation that the impact of the additional 30,000 U.S. troops Obama deployed to Afghanistan this summer "will not be as rapid" as the 2007 so-called "surge" of American forces in Iraq. "But progress has been made," Lieberman quoted Petraeus as saying. The delegation also included Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. The challenge of the 2011 deadline - by all but Gillibrand - illustrates the foreign policy challenge that Obama will face in the months ahead from conservatives, now that the GOP has wrested control of the House of Representatives. Private analysts, and even some U.S. officials, question the extent to which an influx of American troops in southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces, intensified airstrikes and U.S. Special Forces raids have set back the Taliban-led insurgency. These experts say that while the American offensive has had an impact on the Taliban, disrupting supply networks and money channels, for example, the impact could be fleeting. Ahmed Rashid, a journalist and author of several books on Central Asia, said it remains to be seen whether the U.S. offensive is sustainable; whether Afghan security forces can eventually take over from U.S. ones; and whether the Taliban will simply melt away, only to return. "These are unanswered questions," said Rashid, who was in Kabul to attend a U.N.-sponsored conference on reconciliation in Afghanistan. McCain said that "a good part of Kandahar," Afghanistan's second-largest city, "has the luxury of people living in a secure environment." But reports from the province say that the Taliban, pushed from rural areas by the U.S. offensive, have moved into the city itself and begun a campaign of targeted assassinations against officials of the U.S.-backed government. The senators, who were scheduled to meet with Karzai on Wednesday night, said they would confront him over government corruption, which they warned would doom continued U.S .backing. After visiting Afghanistan, the senators are scheduled to travel to Pakistan, where McCain said they will confront that country's military leaders over support for Islamic militants in Afghanistan, including the al-Qaida-linked Haqqani network. (Jonathan S. Landay in Washington and Nancy A. Youssef in West Point, N.Y., contributed to this story.) |
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| The New York Times November 10, 2010 U.S. Tweaks Message on Troops in Afghanistan By ELISABETH BUMILLER WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is increasingly emphasizing the idea that the United States will have forces in Afghanistan until at least the end of 2014, a change in tone aimed at persuading the Afghans and the Taliban that there will be no significant American troop withdrawals next summer. In a move away from President Obama’s deadline of July 2011 for the start of an American drawdown from Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all cited 2014 this week as the key date for handing over the defense of Afghanistan to the Afghans themselves. Implicit in their message, delivered at a security and diplomatic conference in Australia, was that the United States would be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for at least four more years. Administration officials said the three had made loosely coordinated comments at the conference, in Melbourne, to try to convince Afghans that the United States was not walking away next summer and to warn the Taliban that aggressive operations against them would continue. Although Mr. Obama and administration officials have repeatedly said that July 2011 would be only the start of troop withdrawals, the Taliban have successfully promoted the deadline among the Afghan populace as a large-scale exit of the 100,000 United States troops now in the country. “There’s not really any change, but what we’re trying to do is to get past that July 2011 obsession so that people can see what the president’s strategy really entails,” a senior administration official said Wednesday. In Australia, Mr. Gates said the Taliban would be “very surprised come August, September, October and November, when most American forces are still there, and still coming after them.” The message shift is effectively a victory for the military, which has long said the July 2011 deadline undermined its mission by making Afghans reluctant to work with troops perceived to be leaving shortly. “They say you’ll leave in 2011 and the Taliban will chop their heads off,” Cpl. Lisa Gardner, a Marine based in Helmand Province, told a reporter this past spring. This summer Gen. James T. Conway, then the Marine Corps’s commandant, went so far as to say that the deadline “was probably giving our enemy sustenance.” Last year the White House insisted on the July deadline to inject a sense of urgency into the Afghans to get their security in order — military officials acknowledge that it has partly worked — but also to quiet critics in the Democratic Party upset about Mr. Obama’s escalation of the war and his decision to order 30,000 more troops to the country. On Wednesday, the White House insisted that there had been no change in tone. “The old message was, we’re looking to July 2011 to begin a transition,” a White House official said. “Now we’re telling people what happens beyond 2011, and I don’t think that represents a shift. We’re bringing some clarity to the policy of our future in Afghanistan.” Like most people involved in the issue, the official asked for anonymity because a review of Mr. Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan is under way and people involved in it are reluctant to speak openly to reporters. Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, was adamant on Wednesday night that the White House had not shifted. “The president has been crystal clear that we will begin drawing down troops in July of 2011,” he said. “There is absolutely no change to that policy.” The 2014 date will be a focus at a NATO summit meeting that Mr. Obama is to attend next week in Lisbon, Portugal, where the alliance is to be presented with a transition plan, drawn up by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, that calls for a gradual four-year shifting of security responsibility to the Afghans. Administration officials said that the document had no timetable for specific numbers of troop withdrawals and instead set forth the conditions that had to be met in crucial provinces before NATO forces could hand off security to the Afghans. Administration officials emphasized that the 2014 date was first set by President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who mentioned it in his inaugural address last year and again at a conference in Kabul this past summer. The officials acknowledged that the 2014 date was based on the presumption that the American military would be successful enough in fighting the Taliban that significant withdrawals would be under way by then. Recently, commanders in some parts of Afghanistan have reported a tactical shift in momentum away from the Taliban, but officials in Washington, though encouraged, have been skeptical or reluctant to say this will translate into strategic success. Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was last in Afghanistan in September, said the 2014 date made sense, because the Afghan Army and the police were scheduled to increase their numbers to 350,000, their goal, by 2013. “It is far enough away to allow lots to happen, yet it is still close enough to debunk the myth of an indefinite foreign occupation of the country,” Mr. O’Hanlon said. But Mr. Gates has said that the United States will nonetheless be in Afghanistan for many more years to come. |
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| ABC News S.C. Senator Says Talk of Strategy Change a 'Disaster' By JOSHUA MILLER WASHINGTON, Nov. 14, 2010 In an exclusive interview today on "This Week," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told anchor Christiane Amanpour that he was "just stunned" by Afghan President Hamid Karzai's comments to the Washington Post that took issue with a fundamental part of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. "You know Christiane, I'm just stunned," Graham said, noting that he had dinner with Karzai. "The focus of the article is the night raids. We were briefed by our military commanders that … we own the night, militarily, and are making huge impact on the Taliban, the insurgency as a whole." "This didn't come up at all," he said. "At the end of the day, there was no discussion about a difference between [Gen. David] Petraeus and Karzai in terms of strategy. I would just add this: If we cannot use night raids with our Afghan partners, then that's a big loss in terms of gaining security. The Petraeus strategy must be allowed to go forward for us to be successful," he said. Related Bayh Takes on The Politics of Pelosi Reagan Budget Dir.: 'Mad Men' at Fed 'Out of Control' Rand Paul Long on Cuts, Short on Specifics "The security gains are obvious. We're not there yet, but we're moving in the right direction. And to take the night raids off the table would be a disaster," Graham said. In an interview with the Washington Post, Karzai lashed out at a key part of NATO's anti-insurgent strategy; the raids to kill and capture members of the insurgency. "The raiding homes at night. Terrible. Terrible," he told the Post. "A serious cause of the Afghan people's disenchantment with NATO and with the Afghan government. Bursting into homes at night, arresting Afghans, this isn't the business of any foreign troops. "The American people are well intentioned," Karzai told the Post. Asked by the paper whether the U.S. government is similarly well-intentioned, Karzai said, "That has to be proven." 2011 Deadline Amanpour asked Graham whether he believed U.S. troops would stay in Afghanistan in significant numbers after next summer's White House deadline for a transition to Afghan security control. In Need of a Reliable Partner "Yes, I do. I think in the summer of 2011, we can bring some troops, but we're going to need a substantial number of troops in Afghanistan past that; 2014 is the right date to talk about. That's when Karzai suggests that Afghans will be in the lead," the senator said. "Post-2014, when the Afghans hopefully get in the lead, it'd be great to have a couple of air bases there in perpetuity to help the Afghans to send the right signal to the regions," he said. "But none of this is possible unless you have a reliable partner in the Afghan government." |
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| Meredith Buel | VOA News | Islamabad Sun 14 Nov 2010 The U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, says U.S. and NATO combat forces will be phased out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and the handover to Afghan security forces will begin in the middle of next year. Holbrooke's remarks came during a discussion with a group of journalists in Pakistan. Ambassador Holbrooke acknowledged there is confusion in the region over the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan. U.S. President Barack Obama has set July 2011 as the date to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. However Holbrooke and other American officials are now stressing the combat mission is not likely to end until 2014. "The substantial combat forces should be phased out at the end of 2014, four years from now. Some withdrawals, the beginning of transition, will occur starting in July of next year and that process will not be completed until the end of 2014." Ambassador Holbrooke's remarks came on the same day The Washington Post newspaper published an interview with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who called for the U.S. to reduce the visibility and intensity of its military operations in Afghanistan. Mr. Karzai said he wants an end to night raids by U.S. Special Operations forces, a key component of the American military's counterinsurgency strategy. Ambassador Holbrooke says he understands President Karzai wants full sovereignty of the country to be returned to the Afghan people and he says that future goal is shared by the United States. Holbrooke says, however, tough military measures are required to protect the Afghan people and Mr. Karzai's own government from the Taliban insurgency. "But in the current circumstances the military actions he is concerned with also are essential to protect his own government and its people. And the balance has to be carefully calibrated on a regular basis and reexamined continually." Ambassador Holbrooke stressed that U.S. policy to transition security control of areas to Afghan Army forces and police is not what he called an "exit strategy" for the region. He says America made that mistake before and suffered terrible consequences when terrorists attacked the United States in 2001. "In 1989, after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, the United States lost all interest in Afghanistan and turned its back on the region with results that led directly to 9-11 and to the war today. So what I want to be clear on is, we are not going to do that again." Holbrooke says the American commitment to South Asia is long and enduring. Some U.S. officials have been putting pressure on Pakistan to do more to fight Taliban and al-Qaida militants in the tribal regions along its border with Afghanistan. A special focus is on North Waziristan, a mixed cauldron of armed jihadi groups U.S. military officials have called the "epicenter of terrorism." Pakistan has indicated it will consider mounting a military offensive in North Waziristan, but says its Army is currently stretched too thin. Ambassador Holbrooke appeared to be sympathetic with Pakistan's concerns. "On North Waziristan this is a tactical decision that can only be made by the Pakistani Army and they feel they do not have the resources right now and I think they have a point. I hope that this event will take place. This is Pakistan and the United States cannot dictate to the Pakistani military.” Holbrooke says despite some media reports there are no peace negotiations taking place with the Taliban. He says there have been some contacts or what he called "talks about talks," but so far, Holbrooke says, there have been no substantial discussions or secret negotiations about reconciliation with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. |
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| AntiWar.com One Day After Announcing End of Combat Operations, Holbrooke Recants by Jason Ditz, November 15, 2010 US Special Ambassador Richard Holbrooke raised a few eyebrows yesterday when he announced, in front of a number of reports, that the withdrawal from Afghanistan would begin in July and that the war would be over by 2014. Which was particularly surprising as a number of other officials, including the president, have repeatedly disavowed the July drawdown date and have made the 2014 date out to be the prospective start of some transition to Afghan leadership of the war. Holbrooke seems to have changed his mind today, however, insisting that there is absolutely no “exit strategy” for the nearly decade long Afghan War and insisting that 2014 would not be the end of the international occupation of Afghanistan. NATO is expected to focus this weekend’s Lisbon summit on the Afghan War, but as is so often the case officials will not consider any strategy that might seem like ending the war. According to NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, continuing the war will be the only option considered. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz * Clinton Defends Afghan Night Raids - November 15th, 2010 * US Hopes to Establish Bases as Yemen Fight Escalates - November 15th, 2010 * US: One Year May Not Be Enough for Mideast Peace - November 15th, 2010 * Napolitano Shrugs Off Complaints About TSA Policies - November 15th, 2010 * NATO: Missile Shield Doesn't Need to Specifically Target Anyone - November 15th, 2010 |
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| (AP) ~ 5:15 am EST Wed 17 Nov 2010 KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO forces may still be leading some combat operations in Afghanistan beyond 2014, the alliance's top civilian in the country said Wednesday, explaining the date given for shifting authority to the Afghan government is not a deadline. The comment was the latest indication that the U.S.-led military operation in Afghanistan will continue to be sizable well into the next decade, despite plans to draw down troops and transfer responsibility to the Afghan government. "It's a goal," Mark Sedwill said of the 2014 date. "It's realistic but not guaranteed." He told reporters in the capital that the transition to Afghan control of security will be slow and piecemeal — often starting with individual districts and building up to the province level. Each area will be evaluated for transfer based on four criteria — the security situation, the capacity of Afghan security forces in the area, the preparations of NATO forces and the progress toward governance reforms. As a result, some areas could still be very much held and secured by NATO forces years after the benchmark passes. "There might still be one or two parts of the country where the transition process is ongoing and that might last into 2015 or beyond," Sedwill said. "This is the point about 2014, it's not an end of mission. It's not even a complete change of mission, but it is an inflection point where the balance of the mission would have shifted." Two-thirds of all enemy-initiated attacks occur in three provinces — Kandahar and Helmand in the south and Kunar in the northeast, so those areas will likely be the last to be handed over, NATO officials have said, with 10 Afghan districts accounting for 50 percent of all the violence. In addition, specialist strike units that target terrorist operatives are likely to keep conducting operations even after the Afghan government has taken over responsibility, Sedwill said. He said both 2011 — the date set for U.S. troops to begin drawing down — and 2014 are "intermediate milestones" in a larger mission that will last much longer. A summit of Afghan leaders and allies Lisbon this weekend will aim to set broad terms for that longer mission. NATO and the Afghan government plan to sign an agreement that will set out the international community's commitment to Afghanistan, including support for training forces, the growth of the Afghan military and intelligence sharing, Sedwill said. "We want to build the Afghan leadership so they're taking more and more responsibility for themselves but we recognize it has got to be underwritten by long-term international commitment," Sedwill said. The Lisbon summit will be the third and largest international meeting on Afghanistan this year as the country's Western allies have come under increasing pressure to provide exit strategies that show timelines for leaving Afghanistan or at least shifting to a mainly training mission. Both the Afghan government and NATO nations have said they're committed to making this transition happen, but they've been hampered this year by increasing violence, with NATO deaths climbing and insurgents expanding attacks to previously peaceful areas in the north and west. Even with the NATO mission appearing to stretch out longer and longer, Sedwill said that the momentum had shifted in NATO's favor. "It's still clearly fragile. There are significant risks and there will be a long and hard campaign ahead, but we believe that in 2010 we have achieved what we wished to, which is that we've regained the initiative — having, candidly, lost it in the past few years," Sedwill said. He said that this assessment was the conclusion of an assessment of the Afghan campaign that he had conducted with Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. |
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| Nato representative in Kabul says 2014 deadline for ending combat role might not be met Jon Boone in Kabul guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 November 2010 11.55 GMT photo caption: An Afghan police officer stands guard near the site of an explosion in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last week. Photograph: Foulad Hamdard/AP Afghanistan could experience "eye-watering" levels of violence after foreign combat troops withdraw from Afghanistan in four years' time, the Nato representative in Kabul warned today. Mark Sedwill, the civilian counterpart to US commander General David Petraeus, also said that the target of handing over security responsibilities to the Afghan army and police by the end of 2014 might not be met. The alliance's plan for the "transition" of responsibilities from Nato's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to the still embryonic Afghan army and police will be high on the agenda at this week's Nato summit in Lisbon. Many European countries that contribute troops see the plan as their ticket out of an unpopular war, but Sedwill warned that success was not guaranteed and the 2014 date was merely an "inflection point" in a campaign that would continue for a long time. In some areas of the country transition could run "to 2015 and beyond" he said. Although the alliance hopes that foreign-led counterinsurgency operations will come to an end, troops would still be required to train and support the Afghan security forces and maintain "a strategic over watch" position, he said. He conceded that a "residual insurgency" was likely to continue in many parts of the country. "There would still be a certain level of violence and probably levels of violence that by western standards will be pretty eye-watering," he said. In such a scenario special forces units would be required to remain and fight, he said, in addition to the logistical support, training and equipment provided for Afghan units. Sedwill said that with so many uncertainties, Nato's 2014 deadline was "realistic but not guaranteed". He also warned that transition was "not a cheap option" that would allow troops to leave quickly. "We are not looking at forces flooding out of this country as transition starts. One of the key principles of this is you reinvest the transition dividend." Nato is refusing to announce where the transition process will start for fear of turning those districts into targets for insurgents to increase their operations and mount intimidation campaigns against government officials. Sedwill said that he expected Nato to hand over several provinces in the first half of next year. However, he said the transfer of responsibility for both security and development activities would vary across the country. In some areas, entire provinces would be transferred, while in others it would be districts, or even individual towns. Transition would take between 18 and 24 months in some areas, depending on the resilience of the insurgency and the capability of the Afghan army, police and the village militia-style "local police" that are being established. The Afghan police and army are being built up at breakneck speed. Both institutions remain beset with problems, including widespread illiteracy and drug abuse. The army has also struggled to recruit among southern Pashtuns, the group that predominates in areas of the country most affected by insurgency. The head of the Nato training mission, General William Caldwell, has complained that he does not have enough trainers to meet the transition deadline. The attempt to create an army and police up to the job of taking over requires vast sums of money. Even after they have been built up to strength, officials say they will cost around $6bn (£3.7bn) a year to run – about half of Afghanistan's current GDP and more than the US gives to both Israel and Egypt. Sedwill said the IMF had calculated that Afghanistan woukd not be able to pay for its own security forces until 2023. |
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| By Ian Simpson 3:53 pm EST Wed 17 Nov 2010 KABUL (Reuters) – The handover from NATO-led forces to Afghans should start in the first half of 2011 but poor security in some areas could see it run past a 2014 target, a NATO official said on Wednesday before an important summit. With attention focusing on the security transition from foreign forces to Afghans over the next four years, newly appointed French Defense Minister Alain Juppe called Afghanistan "a trap for all the parties involved. Afghanistan will be among the priorities for North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leaders when an annual summit begins on Friday, with the pace and scope of troop withdrawals at the top of their agenda. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has made 2014 the target for Afghan forces to assume full security responsibility from foreign forces, with Washington planning to begin a gradual drawdown of its forces from July 2011. Others doubt enough Afghan forces will be ready in time to meet Karzai's target, but U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have called it realistic. The 2014 target is part of a wider plan by Karzai that includes talks with Taliban-led insurgents, reintegration and reconciliation and the ramping up of the Afghan security forces to enable the transition. "We expect that the transition process will start in the first half of 2011," said Mark Sedwill, the top civilian NATO representative in Afghanistan. Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who will chair this week's summit, said on Monday there was no alternative to military operations to force the Taliban toward a political solution. Britain's Chief of the Defense Staff General David Richards said in London that both sides in the conflict were "at the early stages of a mutual understanding that we can't go on doing this forever" and "there's an interest in seeking a solution." However, Mullah Mohammad Omar, the secretive leader of the Afghan Taliban, this week labeled talk of negotiations "mere propaganda. EXPECTATIONS LOWERED Sedwill did not say where the transition would begin but U.S. and NATO leaders have recently sought to play down expectations, saying it would likely start at the district rather than the provincial level. Sedwill said the transition could run "to 2015 and beyond" in some areas that could still face security problems. "We expect to have strategic overwatch in large parts of the country by that time (2014)," he told reporters in Kabul, with civil administration to follow the security transition. NATO troops would then assume support and training duties as Afghans took on the burden of combat roles. "The end of 2014 does not mean that the mission is over, but the mission changes. It's the inflection point, if you like," Sedwill said. U.S. President Barack Obama, who will review his Afghanistan war strategy in December, has set July 2011 as the start of his drawdown and European leaders are following a similar timetable. Juppe, for example, said France wanted to discuss in Lisbon how to reduce its 3,500-strong force in Afghanistan. Many European leaders are under pressure at home to justify their continued combat support for an increasingly unpopular war. Military and civilian casualties are at record levels and an increase in attacks over the past week will likely send an even more sobering message to NATO leaders in Lisbon. U.S. and NATO commanders have been talking up recent successes but there are still points of friction with their Afghan allies, most recently over the use of "night raids" on Afghan homes while hunting Taliban and other insurgents. Karzai told The Washington Post he wanted the U.S. military to reduce its visibility and the intensity of its operations and that night raids "have to go away. But Sedwill defended the tactic, saying the raids were as "surgical" as they could be and were an important weapon. "We are under no illusion that you can run a counterinsurgency program without these operations," he said. (Additional reporting by Mohammed Abbas in London, Editing by Paul Tait and Ralph Boulton) |
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| by News Source on November 16, 2010 | The War on Terror Patrick Porter writes: The road to strategic hell is paved with good intentions. Consider the words of General Sir David Richards, the chief of defence staff. We can’t defeat al-Qaida and its ilk, he believes, but we can contain it. In other words, we might never destroy it physically or ideologically but we can limit its potency and lethality “to the point that our lives and our children’s lives” are “led securely”. Amen to that. But what does “containment” look like? It is a moveable idea. During the cold war, containment meant different things to George Kennan, its intellectual architect, and the later US presidents who expanded and militarised it. At its best, it is a practical idea. It holds that, without exhausting or overextending ourselves, we can bound a threat and curtail its ability to operate, then wait patiently for it to wither into an irrelevance or nuisance. It works well with a self-defeating enemy, be it the Soviet Union with its doomed Marxist-Leninist system and imperial overstretch, or al-Qaida, a movement that habitually alienates the very Muslims it claims to represent. Containment is not only about outlasting the enemy, but about keeping costs down and avoiding self-defeating behaviour. But General Richards’s containment is more ambitious. It involves “upstream prevention”, “education and democracy” and – judging by his other recent remarks – maybe a future military intervention in Yemen. He doesn’t favour more military interventions now, but it would be “barmy to say that one day we wouldn’t be back in that position”. This means using our (depleted) wealth, our (reduced) military and our (dubious) confidence that we know what is good for others. |
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| Cameron Stewart, Paul Kelly | The Australian | November 09, 2010 12:00AM THE US intends to stay in Afghanistan for the long term, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates vowed yesterday. Mr Gates said the US would exert an influence on the country long after the combat troops had left. His comments came as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that next year there would be parts of the war-ravaged country that would once again be under the control of the Afghan government and its own troops rather than US forces. The extent of this transition of power would depend on conditions on the ground and would not be based on a specific timetable. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said he wants Afghan security forces to take responsibility for security in the country by 2014. Speaking at a press conference in Melbourne following the Ausmin security talks between the US and Australia, Mrs Clinton said: "The strategies that we are implementing together (with Australia) in Afghanistan is the right strategy and we are committed to pursuing that strategy and being very conscious of the challenges that it poses to us. "The goal is to be able to transition security to the Afghans themselves starting next year, but that transition will be conditions-based and will be determined as the analysis of our commanders in the field suggest to the civilian leadership in both of our countries. "The progress that we believe is occurring is very challenging, it takes patience, it requires all of us to understand that this is a tough fight that we are in. But we are convinced that starting next year, there will be parts of Afghanistan that will be under the control of the Afghan government and its security forces. We can't tell you when or on what timetable because we will be making those assessments based on the conditions as they occur." Mr Gates said any notion that the US would withdraw from Afghanistan any time soon was mistaken. "We are not getting out," he said. He said that the US would maintain an active presence in Afghanistan long after combat troops had left. "We are all convinced we have to stay in Afghanistan and remain a partner even after most of our troops are gone," he said. "We don't see this as a relationship that ends when the security transition is completed." His comments echo those of Julia Gillard, who said during a parliamentary debate on Afghanistan last month that Australia could be involved in that country for at least another 10 years as military assistance gave way to civil-led aid and development assistance. In relation to negotiations with the Taliban, Mr Gates said there was "broad agreement" that there needed to be a reconciliation process. His personal opinion was that the Taliban needed to see its prospects for success had diminished dramatically and "that they may well lose". "They have to see they are not ultimately going to be successful in taking the country by force," he said. |
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| November 17, 2010 New American The foreign policy bait-and-switch continues. First, President Barack Obama declared the end of combat in Iraq, withdrawing some U.S. troops but leaving many others behind, possibly for decades, and redefining their role as “advise and assist” — whereupon they continued engaging in combat. Now, with Obama having publicly stated his intent to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan next July, both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus are arguing for a long-term, if not permanent, U.S. presence in Afghanistan. On top of that, British Defense Chief Gen. Sir David Richards, echoing their sentiments, has stated that “Nato now needs to plan for a 30 or 40 year role to help the Afghan armed forces hold their country against the militants,” according to the Daily Mail, though he “stuck to the government’s plans to withdraw combat troops by 2014 but made clear that thousands of troops will be needed long after that date.” In an interview on November 14, Richards said, “Everyone is clear that we will have to remains [sic] a lot longer than” four to five years. “The plans,” he added, “are now in place to do that” and will be made “rather clearer” at the upcoming NATO summit in Lisbon. Richards correctly argued that the Taliban and al-Qaeda cannot be defeated militarily and that victory cannot be declared by “marching into another nation’s capital,” as in conventional warfare. These organizations, after all, are loosely organized and have no command center that can be neutralized. However, he contended, victory over Islamic terrorism in the traditional sense “is unnecessary and would never be achieved. But we can [sic] contain it to the point that our lives and our children’s lives are led securely? I think we can.” The problem is that Richards, along with most other members of the government and media elite, believes that continued intervention in Afghanistan by foreign countries is the best way to go about containing terrorism. Therefore, in his opinion, U.S. and British forces must remain in Afghanistan for “generations,” albeit under the rubric of assistance rather than combat. Richards, writes the Mail, “said that there would need to be more support for the military from political, diplomatic and international aid efforts if the effort is to succeed.” (He did allow for the possibility of negotiating with some Taliban members, an option that the Obama administration has opposed.) The idea that Islamic terrorism is, in large measure, a response to foreign intervention in Muslim countries seems never to have crossed Richards’ mind; but then such thoughts are anathema to a political establishment with an enormously inflated opinion of its own benevolence and effectiveness. Rare indeed is the politician or pundit who suggests that his own government ought to maintain “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none,” as Thomas Jefferson counseled. When one does make such a suggestion, he can expect to be shouted down with charges of “isolationism.” Thus, both British and American officials, regardless of political affiliation, are playing along with the charade of ending combat while continuing to station troops in volatile regions and of stamping out terrorism by prolonging the conditions that incite it. In Britain, Prime Minster David Cameron of the Conservative Party “has recently moderated [his] stance” toward withdrawing troops from Afghanistan next year in response to Richards’ and Petraeus’ assertions that “it may be 2012 before there can be any significant draw down of frontline forces,” says the Mail. Likewise, the paper reported that the Labor Party’s shadow defense secretary, Jim Murphy, “said Gen Richards was ‘right’ that there was no purely military solution and said there would be ‘no white flag surrender moment.’ He added: ‘It will be for the long haul.’ ” On this side of the Atlantic, Obama himself “is going to make a public announcement of the US government’s official abandonment of the July 2011 date and the new 2014 ‘target’ for the war effort’s transition to Afghan control,” according to Antiwar.com’s Jason Ditz, who adds that “Obama will be vowing an ‘enduring presence’ in Afghanistan beyond the 2014 date.” It appears, then, that Afghanistan (and Iraq) will be occupied by foreign troops for years to come, costing American and British taxpayers a hefty sum and increasing, rather than decreasing, the chances of terrorism against those same taxpayers. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion; and just this summer CIA Director Leon Panetta estimated there were no more than 100 al-Qaeda militants in all of Afghanistan. At the same time, NATO is spending an estimated $50 million for every Taliban member it kills in that same country. Surely there are better uses for this increasingly scarce money, such as in paying down both governments’ astronomical debts. Bringing the troops home, cutting the defense budget down to what is needed strictly to defend our actual territory, and eliminating foreign aid and other intervention will do far more for our pocketbooks and our security than another 40 years’ worth of futile — and, from the American perspective, unconstitutional — intervention. Photo: Head of the British Army, General Sir David Richards gives a talk entitled 'Future War' at Chatham House in London, Sept. 17, 2009: AP Images |
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| As NATO leaders meet in Lisbon this weekend, the U.S. is expected to endorse a plan for slow withdrawal and gradually handing over security responsibility by 2014. November 17, 2010|By David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times Reporting from Washington — President Obama built his Afghanistan strategy around the bet that he could quickly turn around a "must win" war by narrowing his goals and sending more troops. This weekend he will make his clearest acknowledgement yet that doing so will actually take years. At a summit in Lisbon this weekend, Obama and other NATO leaders will endorse a plan to gradually turn combat responsibility over to the Afghan army and police by 2014, a timetable that will keep tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan well beyond the end of Obama's first term. U.S. and Afghan officials previously have made it clear that Afghanistan will need U.S. help against the insurgency for many years, but the transition plan being presented in Lisbon will be the first time Obama publicly backs such a time frame. "Reality is starting to set in," said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen David Barno, who commanded U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. "There's a better appreciation by the administration that you can't have instantaneous results." Even as Obama has dramatically increased troop levels to nearly 100,000 during his first two years, he has sought to avoid becoming bogged down. He set a major review of policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the end of 2010, and said that troops would start leaving Afghanistan by July 2011. He has emphasized that the United States' goal is to "degrade" the Taliban, not to defeat it. The full effect of the U.S. troop buildup isn't clear yet. Military officers familiar with data coming in from the field say there have been some promising gains, especially in areas of the south where tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops have been sent. The number of Taliban fighters captured and killed has increased sharply, but so have insurgent attacks and casualties suffered by Americans and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force. Training of Afghan security forces has accelerated, but many units, especially the police, remain poorly trained, corrupt and unable to battle the insurgency without Western assistance, particularly in areas where the Taliban remains strongest. In the White House, confidence that U.S. involvement could be carefully calibrated has given way to a more sober assessment that lasting gains may take years to accomplish. |
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| By SLOBODAN LEKIC and ROBERT BURNS The Associated Press Thursday, November 18, 2010; 8:42 AM LISBON, Portugal -- NATO is expected to set itself a 2014 target for handing over security to Afghans at a summit that starts here Friday, as the alliance's appetite for the conflict dwindles after nine years of fighting, growing European war angst, and renewed criticism by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The allies appear to agree that the target year is realistic - but that hardly means the war is ending. The U.S. in particular is wary of giving the impression that the original aim of invading Afghanistan in 2001 - to deny al-Qaida a base from which to launch more terrorist attacks on the West - will be achieved by then. So NATO plans to pledge an enduring partnership with Afghanistan at the two day gathering in Lisbon - while admitting past mistakes. "I think that, seen retrospectively, we underestimated the challenge and our operation in Afghanistan didn't have sufficient resources, and yes, that was a mistake," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told Portugal's Renascenca in comments broadcast Thursday as leaders of the 28 Nato member nations headed to Lisbon. He added: "We're on the right track now and that's why I'm very optimistic about our Afghanistan operation and we'll make a positive announcement in Lisbon - that the handover is about to begin." The escalating war has given the alliance its biggest challenge since it was formed 61 years ago. But victory is far from assured, and a hasty pullout would seriously undermine confidence in the alliance on both sides of the Atlantic. Already, some key allies worry publicly that military force is not the best way to put Afghanistan on a track to stability. France's new defense minister, Alain Juppe, told a radio interviewer Wednesday that Afghanistan is a "trap" for allied troops. He added, however, that French forces will not withdraw fully until "Afghan authorities have the situation in hand." Some analysts see a grimmer scenario. "Success in Afghanistan is almost impossible," said Shmuel Bar, a director at the Institute of Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel. "If NATO is making its future contingent on victory in Afghanistan, they are not living in the real world. All they can expect to achieve are some limited aims, such as preventing the war from spilling over into Pakistan." Karzai is scheduled to address Saturday's session. He caused an international stir by demanding in a Washington Post interview last weekend that NATO reduce its military operations and stop what the military believes is a highly successful tactic - night raids conducted jointly with Afghan troops against suspected Taliban leaders. NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, said Karzai's comments were unproductive. "We have different perspectives, that's natural," Sedwill said. "It is much better if we work those different perspectives out in private." The Lisbon meeting unfolds against the backdrop of President Barack Obama's internal review of the war strategy he announced in December 2009, which included sending 30,000 extra U.S. troops to Afghanistan to regain momentum from the Taliban. Obama is expected to finish his review by year's end and face a new Congress in January that may scrutinize his war strategy more closely following the Democrats' loss of the House and setbacks in the Senate. The NATO leaders are expected to endorse Karzai's proposal that Afghanistan take lead responsibility for security - and for the development of its government institutions and economic development - by the end of 2014. This process would begin in the first half of next year with an unspecified but small number of areas transferred to Afghan control. The plan would allow NATO members to begin reducing their troop contingent of about 140,000, but the full timeline has yet to be determined. Obama has said he will start pulling out some of the approximately 100,000 U.S. troops there next July, but U.S. officials have said the number going home is likely to be small. Others are leaving sooner. Canada said Tuesday its 3,000 troops will end their combat mission next year, with 950 remaining to train Afghan troops. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said this week that his country will begin withdrawing in 2012. The outlines of a plan to begin a transition to Afghan control, and to make 2014 the target date for completing the shift, have been in the works for many months. But Lisbon will mark the first public embrace of the plan by NATO heads of government. Working out the details has been difficult, hampered by competing interpretations of how the war is going. Last April, when NATO foreign ministers publicly approved a plan that said the shift to Afghan control would begin before the end of 2010, there were high hopes for an intensifying NATO offensive in southern Afghanistan. While that offensive has succeeded in capturing or killing large numbers of Taliban fighters, the effect on the war's overall direction is unclear. U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, has offered upbeat public assessments lately. He is believed to be concerned, however, that a too-fast pullout of allied forces could jeopardize chances for consolidating recent battlefield gains. Other senior officials have stressed that the pace and scale of troop withdrawals be decided as circumstances unfold. Sedwill has called the 2014 target date "realistic but not guaranteed," warning that allied fighting beyond 2014 may be necessary. NATO's troop presence may not be heavily reduced by 2014, he said, but the mission is to have shifted to training and advising the Afghan army and police rather than leading combat operations. Leaders arriving in Lisbon made it clear they have largely agreed on two key elements of the Afghan plan. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard told Parliament she will argue for two outcomes: A transition to Afghan-led security by the end of 2014, and a commitment by NATO and international organizations including the United Nations and the World Bank not to abandon Afghanistan after 2014. The war is increasingly unpopular with voters in NATO nations, and alliance leaders worry about the political fallout unless they agree on a credible withdrawal timeline. As a result, they are expected to unanimously approve the transition plan. Allied commanders highlight a series of advances this year against Taliban insurgents in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, to emphasize that the transition strategy is ready. But some analysts point out that that the Taliban have been hitting back. Allied casualties have reached record levels of about 650 dead so far this year, and the Taliban have spread into parts of the country where they were not active before. They retain sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan. Marko Papic, a senior analyst at Stratfor, a global intelligence analysis firm, argues that the best the allies can now hope for is to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. "With terrorist groups such as the al-Qaida shifting to other locales, it is not even clear if the original goal of the war - to disable a transnational network of terrorists - still has any bearing on the U.S. and NATO presence in Afghanistan," he said. --- Alan Clendenning and Barry Hatton contributed to this report from Lisbon. |
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| By SLOBODAN LEKIC and ALAN CLENDENNING, Associated Press 7:01 am EST Sat 20 Nov 2010 LISBON, Portugal – NATO will start reducing troop levels in Afghanistan next year and hand over control of security to the Afghans in 2014 but will not abandon the country after that and let it slip back into chaos, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Saturday. Rasmussen, President Barack Obama, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and leaders of the 28-nation alliance were meeting behind closed doors to discuss the alliance's exit strategy from Afghanistan on the second day of Nato's annual summit. They were also deciding how NATO will give advice, training and logistics help to Afghanistan's military over the long term. "The direction starting today is clear, toward Afghan leadership and Afghan ownership (of the war)," Rasmussen said in his opening remarks. NATO officials stressed that the alliance will maintain a military presence in Afghanistan long after it begins withdrawing troops. "We will agree here today on a long-term partnership between NATO and Afghanistan to endure beyond the end of our combat mission," Fogh Rasmussen said. "If the enemies of Afghanistan have the idea that they can wait it out until we leave, they have the wrong idea. We will stay as long as it takes to finish our job." Ivo Daalder, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, said the 2014 goal and the end of NATO's combat role in Afghanistan beyond that date "are not one and the same." But many NATO nations have insisted they will remove all their troops by 2014, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague reiterated said his country will end its combat role in Afghanistan by 2015. "Make no mistake about it, that is an absolute commitment and deadline for us," the British news agency Press Association quoted him as saying. He added: "This remains a phenomenal challenge. There is a huge amount of work to do in Afghanistan, and I wouldn't want anyone to think we can relax in any way about Afghanistan." The end date to hand Afghans control of security is three years beyond the time that Obama has said he will start withdrawing U.S. troops, and the challenge is to avoid a rush to the exits as public opinion turns more sharply against the war and Karzai pushes for greater Afghan control. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, was expected to make a closed-door presentation emphasizing that stepped-up military operations this year, with the addition of thousands more U.S. combat troops, have made strides toward weakening the Taliban and eventually creating the conditions for peace negotiations. But he also is believed to be concerned that the transition not turn into a departure before Afghanistan is stable. Despite the optimistic statements about progress in the war, the Taliban have shown no sign of weakening under the intense military pressure. Allied deaths have reached record levels this year, and the guerrillas have expanded their activities into hitherto safe regions in the north and west of the country. A senior Pakistani intelligence official said Saturday the U.S. is seeking to expand the areas where American missiles can target Taliban and al-Qaida operatives but that Pakistan has refused the request because of domestic opposition to the strikes. The U.S. is increasingly relying on the missile strikes by remote-controlled drones flying over Pakistani territory to find and kill Islamist extremists that have free rein in the lawless areas along the border, where they plan attacks against American and NATO troops in Afghanistan Another major event is a meeting of NATO's 28 leaders with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. NATO and Moscow are expected to sign agreements to expand the alliance's supply routes to Afghanistan through Russia, and set up a new training program in Russia for counter-narcotics agents from Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries. They also are expected to agree on a program to provide training to Afghan helicopter crews. Obama won NATO support to build a missile shield over Europe, an ambitious commitment to protect against Iranian attack while demonstrating the alliance's continuing relevance. Two key unanswered questions about the missile shield — will it work and can the Europeans afford it? — were put aside for the present in the interest of celebrating the agreement as a boost for NATO solidarity. ___ Associated Press writers Julie Pace and Robert Burns contributed to this report. |
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| (AFP) – Sat 20 Nov 2010 SANTIAGO — US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Saturday that only a "very modest" number of international troops will remain in Afghanistan after a projected 2014 withdrawal. On a visit to Chile, part of a four-day trip to South America designed to bolster military cooperation in the region, Gates said in a speech that he expected "some fraction" of the international forces in Afghanistan "will remain to train and provide support for the Afghans." He suggested troops will recalibrate their mission like that in Iraq, where foreign forces ostensibly remain in the country in an advising capacity. "What we've done is embrace a goal that was established by President (Hamid) Karzai, that by the end of 2014, the primary responsibility for security across all Afghanistan would have been transitioned to Afghan forces," said Gates. NATO leaders meeting in Lisbon have pledged to begin the process of handing over responsibility for security to the Afghan police and military from next year, with a view to ceding full control by the end of 2014. Gates was holding talks in Santiago with his Chilean counterpart, Jaime Ravinet, before heading to Bolivia for a conference of regional defense ministers that is expected to focus on a "hemisphere-wide mechanism to more effectively channel disaster relief," according to US officials. On the sidelines of the conference, Gates is expected to meet with defense ministers from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and El Salvador. |
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| By the CNN Wire Staff November 21, 2010 1:11 p.m. EST Washington (CNN) -- An upcoming military review of the war in Afghanistan is not expected to result in any major changes in U.S. strategy, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said Sunday. In an interview with CNN's "State of the Union" program, Mullen said the U.S.-led international force has "started to make progress" in its mission to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for international terrorist groups. However, Mullen described the progress so far as "fragile." He cited the training of Afghanistan forces to take over security responsibilities as an area in which progress has occurred but challenges remain. The military review is due in December, a year after President Barack Obama ordered additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan as part of a strategy that would see some forces coming home as soon as July 2011. Mullen lauded a weekend meeting of NATO leaders in Portugal that set a goal of ending combat operations for international forces in Afghanistan by the end of 2014. He reaffirmed Obama's statement Saturday that the United States and its allies wanted to hand over security responsibility for all of Afghanistan to that country's security forces by then, and would play a training and support role after that. "We think that's a reasonable goal," Mullen said. "We will still have forces to -- and I think the president said it yesterday as well -- to train and assist," Mullen said of NATO troops in Afghanistan after 2014. The plan is for all combat forces to be out that year, he said. Mullen said the transition of security responsibility from the U.S.-led international force to Afghanistan security forces would start in the spring of 2011, and he described it as a "district by district" approach based on conditions on the ground. |
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| SUSAN SACHS LISBON— From Monday's Globe and Mail Published Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010 5:36PM EST Last updated Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010 6:56PM EST After all the handshakes, pledges, tough talk and edgy good will, the message that emerged from the latest NATO gathering about Afghanistan came with a disclaimer. Foreign combat troops will leave by the end of 2014 but that target date comes with a string of ‘ifs,’ ‘ands’ and ‘buts.’ More related to this story * Afghan president must crack down on corruption, NATO leaders say * From Harper, more hot air on Afghanistan * Taliban vows to keep fighting this winter The two-day summit that ended Saturday in Lisbon committed NATO countries to an open-ended involvement in Afghanistan. While the leaders of the European-American alliance set a goal of withdrawing their combat troops over the next four years, they also signed an accord with Afghan President Hamid Karzai pledging long-term military and reconstruction assistance. They also endorsed a plan to start handing off responsibility for security to Afghan forces next spring, with foreign troops switching to a support and training role and with the aim of completing the transfer within four years. But NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen officials said the date was not a deadline. Combat operations could continue beyond 2014, he warned, and the pace of the transition will have to be determined by conditions on the ground in each town, district and province. The meeting brought together leaders of the countries that have troops on the ground, 28 of them members of NATO and 20 others that joined the international force over the nine years that it has slogged away in Afghanistan. Political support among NATO leaders for an extended military engagement is already wearing thin. The Dutch ended their combat role this summer, withdrawing their 1,950 troops after four years in Uruzgan province in the centre of the country. Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the summit that Canada would not budge from its plans to withdraw its military forces next year. He said the 950 military trainers that Canada has agreed to send in their place will leave March of 2014, regardless of whether other allied forces remain in Afghanistan until the end of that year or beyond. The rest of the assembled presidents and prime ministers, many with elections looming in the next two years, had clearly hoped to bring home a less ambiguous timetable for withdrawal so that they could face down growing domestic opposition to the war. Instead, they got a sobering assessment of the situation on the ground from General David Petraeus, the American commander of the 130,000-strong international force. “After several years during which security deteriorated and governance stalled, we have regained the initiative,” he told them in a prepared statement at the closed-door meeting. “Continued patience will enable us to sustain it,” he added, “despite the inevitable setbacks that lie ahead.” Some 150,000 allied soldiers, the bulk of them American, are now deployed in Afghanistan. They have faced their most intensive fighting, and sustained their highest casualties, in the past year as the United States moved in 30,000 extra troops. British and German leaders, as did President Barack Obama, said they intended to thin out their forces but were prepared to keep some troops in the country if needed beyond 2014. British Prime Minister David Cameron, in an interview with Sky News after the summit, said some of the country’s 9,500 soldiers would stay on to train Afghan forces or deliver aid. “There will not be British troops in large numbers and they won’t be in a combat role” by 2015, he said. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, though, was already anticipating a quicker drawdown. Although NATO officials said they could not say where the first transfers to Afghan forces were likely to occur, Mr. Sarkozy told reporters in Lisbon that some 40 districts have been deemed secure enough to be handed over to Afghan security forces. He said one of them is in Kapisa province where most of the 3,000 French soldiers are deployed, and that one would be transferred next year. The summit laid bare the frustrations of many of the NATO country leaders with Mr. Karzai. They acknowledged that Mr. Karzai, as a fellow politician, he has his own constituency to win over by making good on his campaign promise to have international troops transfer authority over his country’s affairs by 2014. But they also publicly admonished him to more to clean up corruption and appoint local officials on the basis of competence rather than political favouritism. Four years probably will not be enough, according David Sedwill, the top NATO administrator in Afghanistan and the civilian counterpart to Gen. Petraeus. He told the NATO leaders that they can encourage the Afghan government to establish the rule of law, but four years may not be enough. Mr. Sedwill, a British diplomat, described a visit he made to the city of Marjeh in Helmand province earlier this year after allied forces pushed out the Taliban. The community was traumatized, he said, but less by their experience with the Taliban than by with the “brutal and predatory” Afghan police who were in charge before the insurgents took over. “By 2014,” he said, “there will still be pockets of tribal, ethnic, criminal and political violence throughout Afghanistan.” More related to this story * Harper-Rae coalition goes back to Afghanistan's future * NATO: An old soldier fights a defining battle * Extension of Afghan mission result of rare bipartisan effort * Michael Ignatieff faces caucus rift over Afghan extension |
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| Chicago Sun-Times LISBON | Plan is to begin handing off security duties next year, wrap it up in 2014 November 21, 2010 BY ROBERT BURNS AND JULIE PACE LISBON, Portugal -- President Obama and the allies are expected to announce plans Saturday to begin handing off security responsibility in Afghanistan to local forces next year and to complete the transition by the end of 2014. That end date is three years beyond the time that Obama has said he will start withdrawing U.S. troops, and the challenge is to avoid a rush to the exits as public opinion turns more sharply against the war and Afghan President Hamid Karzai pushes for greater Afghan control. That extended deadline could add at least $125 billion in war spending, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments -- based on $1.1 million per soldier per year. "I don't think anyone is seriously talking about cutting war funding as a way of handling the deficit," Todd Harrison, a defense funding expert at the center told the Christian Science Monitor. But higher war costs "could hurt the base defense budget [and] the rest of the discretionary budget." When Obama added 30,000 troops in December 2009 -- there are currently 100,000 -- he said the United States would begin transferring forces out in July 2011. The Pentagon last week said handing over security duties to the Afghans in 2014 was "aspirational." "Although the hope is, the goal is, to have Afghan security forces in the lead over the preponderance of the country by then, it does not necessarily mean that ... everywhere in the country they will necessarily be in the lead," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. In Lisbon, anti-NATO protests are expected to be out in force Saturday. While NATO leaders argue the alliance's military role in Afghanistan is essential for peace, many Europeans are strongly against a troop presence there. AP with Sun-Times wires Related Blog Posts 2014: What happens in Afghanistan afterwards? From Rupee News: Recording History, Narrating Archives. Afghanistan: US vs EU From Rupee News: Recording History, Narrating Archives. |
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| Foreign Policy in Focus By Hannah Gurman, November 22, 2010 Rasmussen, Karzai(To left, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.) On Saturday, at the NATO summit in Lisbon, officials announced 2014 as the target date for withdrawing combat forces from Afghanistan. Afghanistan is already America’s longest war. As of next Saturday, at nine years and 50 days, it will also have exceeded the length of the Soviet’s war in Afghanistan. In 2014, this will have been an 11-year war. Eleven years sounds like a long time, but the U.S. presence in Afghanistan will almost certainly be even longer. While NATO secretary general, Anders Rasmussen framed 2014 as the end of NATO’s combat mission in Afghanistan, Obama made sure to refer to 2014 as a target date rather than a deadline. The withdrawal of U.S. forces would, he noted, depend on the readiness of Afghan forces to take responsibility for their country’s security. Writing for Politico, Josh Gerstein described the NATO announcement as little more than spin. It “seemed intended to generate headlines or at least a public perception of a plan for withdrawal.” In all likelihood, that media strategy will continue well into the future, and will become especially apparent when we arrive at previously announced target dates. In July 2011, we can expect the cameras to be rolling when the official drawdown of soldiers begins. As in Iraq in 2010, in Afghanistan in 2014, we can expect the president to announce the formal end of America’s combat mission and applaud the soldiers for a job well done. As in Iraq, the official end of the combat mission in Afghanistan will not mean the removal of all troops, but rather the continued presence of thousands of soldiers serving as advisors and trainers. And as in Iraq, the line between advisor and combat soldier will continue to be murky. In the end, press conferences about Afghanistan tell us much more about the official media strategy than they do about the administration’s actual plans. Currently, as Nick Turse of TomDispatch has reported, the U.S. has over 400 military bases in Afghanistan and plans for a mega-embassy, the largest in the world. The administration would not embark on a building boom of this scope unless it had plans to be there for a long, long time. |
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| KABUL, Nov. 23 (Xinhua) -- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would keep its limited presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014 but it would not be against the third country, President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday. "NATO as a partner would keep its presence beyond 2014 in Afghanistan but it would be limited and not against any country in the region or the third country,"Karzai told journalists at a news conference in his Palace after returning home from NATO summit. In the two-day summit of the 28-member military alliance wrapped up Saturday in Lisbon,it was agreed that transferring of security responsibility to Afghan security forces from NATO-led International Security Force (ISAF) to begin in 2011 and would be completed by the end of 2014. Having foreign troops in Afghanistan is not always good, and we will try our best to protect our own country, Karzai said when asked by Xinhua correspondent at the press conference if he has the confidence in Afghan National Army to take over the responsibility for national security. Expressing his satisfaction over the agreement reached at Lisbon between the Afghan government and NATO, President Karzai said that the Afghan government can take step towards legitimization of foreign troops' presence in Afghanistan. "Another important point is that NATO agreed that the government of Afghanistan can take step from now on until three years to legitimize the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan and it is a great achievement,"Afghan president noted. Hundreds of civilians had been killed during NATO operations against Taliban over the past nine years, but none of foreign troops has been tried in Afghanistan. If the foreign troops' presence is legitimized, any foreign soldier will be held accountable if commits crimes, according to lawyers. Despite having partnership with NATO, Afghanistan would have relations with other countries, he stated. More than 140,000 NATO-led ISAF forces have been stationed in Afghanistan within the mandate of United Nations to fight Taliban militants, al-Qaida operatives and associated insurgent outfits. Arbitrary operations against insurgents in many cases had caused civilian casualties prompting Afghan government to strongly criticize and call for coordinated operations with Afghan authorities. Meantime, Afghan leader emphasized that NATO and U.S. would have supportive role after 2014 and would continue to equip and finance Afghan security forces. President Karzai, however, noted:"now it is the prime responsibility of Afghans to take over security responsibility and defend our soil against terrorism and the enemies." He also called on NATO and U.S. to equip Afghan security forces with adequate weapons and also warned, "otherwise, we have freedom to obtain weapons from others." While describing U.S. as a strategic partner, the Afghan leader said his administration would further boost relations with Pakistan, Iran, China, Turkey and Russia, adding that he would pay a visit to Russia soon. Related: U.S. military chief calls 2014 "reasonable goal" for Afghan strategy WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) -- A top U.S. military official said on Sunday that it is a "reasonable goal" to turn over security responsibilities to the Afghan security forces by the end of 2014. "I'm very encouraged by what happened in Lisbon over the weekend. NATO, 28 nations who are member nations in addition to another 20 nations who contribute troops, all affirmed 2014 for the time that we turn over security responsibilities to the Afghan security forces," Admiral Mike Mullen, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on CNN's "State of the Union" program. Full story Clinton says Karzai supports U.S. Afghan strategy WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday said Afghan President Hamid Karzai fully supports the U.S. strategy in that country, despite reports that said otherwise. Clinton told CBS' "Face the Nation" that Karzai "is fully in support of the strategy" and "is fully in support of the fact that it is making progress." Full story |
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| Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty photo caption: NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (right) and Afghan President Hamid Karzai sign a long-term security partnership in Lisbon on November 20. But will the partnership endure? November 26, 2010 By Abubakar Siddique LISBON -- Hopes of finding a peaceful resolution to the Afghan conflict remain distant, despite the highly touted successes of NATO's recent Lisbon summit. Indeed, the alliance emerged from the November 19-20 summit with a somewhat clearer exit strategy, the result of the Enduring Partnership agreement aimed at shoring up Afghan forces before handing them security responsibilities by 2014. NATO managed to get members on both sides of the Atlantic on board and, significantly, secured cooperation from Russia, which many Afghans still associate with the Soviet Union's failed occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. But beyond endorsing Afghan President Hamid Karzai's wobbly peace process, the summit failed to touch on critical issues that must be sorted out for sustainable peace to be achieved. Foremost is NATO's highly volatile relationship with Karzai, whose role in leading Afghanistan through the transformation from war to peace is crucial. Another is Kabul's relations with predatory neighbors, whose actions in Afghanistan are unpredictable now that NATO's exit is clearly outlined. Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, downplays the well-documented disagreements with Karzai, comparing them to differences among close friends and family members. But Mark Sedwill, NATO's senior civilian representative in Kabul, acknowledges that there is friction between NATO and the Afghan leader. While they appear to have virtually different perspectives on the Afghan war, he says, such disagreements are not fundamental. According to Sedwill, Karzai, "is always concerned about the impact of the international forces on the lives of the Afghan people and indeed on the hearts and minds in terms of the counterinsurgency campaign. He is, as he said, concerned about how intrusive our presence is. Now, you have to have an intrusive presence when you have 150,000 international forces on the ground seeking to push back an insurgency which has become so threatening as the Taliban have." NATO's Mark Sedwill says 150,000 foreign troops will always be "an intrusive presence." He sees no contradiction between NATO's efforts to kill and capture Taliban field commanders and Karzai's effort to seek a political settlement with them. He characterizes the growing military effort in Afghanistan as a means for pushing the Taliban to an "honorable way out" with Kabul. Sedwill is adamant that the gradual handover of security responsibilities to Afghan forces will ensure stability and will not work to the advantage of the Taliban, whose strategy is to wait out the NATO presence. A Nervous Neighborhood Sedwill also says that Kabul has indicated that its growing military would not be a threat to any of its neighbors, which should assure Pakistan and Iran to support the transition. In 1992, after the fall of Mohammad Najibullah, the last socialist Afghan president, Islamabad hailed the disintegration of the Afghan military as a major strategic success. "We've talked this through very extensively with the Pakistani Army and they support the transition process," Sedwill says. "And indeed for the first time, last month, there was a meeting of the international contact group on Afghanistan attended by a senior Iranian diplomat. And General [David] Petraeus and I were there and one of the things we briefed on was the transition process. And the Iranian representative welcomed the approach that we were taking to it, because Iran recognizes that in the end self-reliance for Afghanistan is in Iran's security interest as well." But such assurances, often wrapped in nice diplomatic language, are unlikely to fundamentally change the postures of Islamabad, Tehran, and other regional countries who look at the struggle in the Hindu Kush as a global and regional battleground for securing interests. Pakistani author and journalist Zahid Hussain says that Pakistan's powerful military establishment is skeptical about whether the 2014 deadline of handing over security responsibilities to the Afghans can be met. He says that Islamabad will be closely watching the situation across its western border to see whether the current and future Afghan government remains friendly to it. Hussain predicts that Pakistan will hedge its bets when it comes to the United States successfully resolving the political conflict among Afghans. Afghan Tug-Of-War Regional rivalries are expected to intensify in the wake of NATO's exit. In an ominous sign of things to come, he says, Islamabad and New Delhi have intensified efforts to increase their influence inside Afghanistan. Critics suggest that over the past nine years, Islamabad harbored Afghan insurgents to confront the growing influence of factions that opposed it during the civil war in the 1990s. Pakistan "will be concerned whether in the future the Indians would have the same kind of influence that they have in Kabul [now], or whether Pakistan will be able to have somebody there who could look more towards them," Hussain says. "The way things are moving, I don't see any possibility of this confrontation coming down." Islamabad wants a prominent role in the negotiations with the Taliban, Hussain says, but it's unclear how much leverage it now has over the Afghan Taliban, some of whose leaders are weary of Islamabad's alliance with Washington. Reports that an imposter participated in recent, highly publicized negotiations with Taliban leaders has undermined NATO's claims of the group's willingness to negotiate. In Kabul, concerns are increasing about the future course. Analysts compare NATO transition plans to the Red Army's withdrawal in the late 1989, which was followed by collapse of state institutions and years of intense civil war after the West and the Soviet Union abandoned Afghanistan. This vacuum was filled by a vicious civil war bankrolled by Kabul's neighbors and also attracted Al-Qaeda. Speaking to journalists on November 23, President Karzai called on Afghans to unite to prevent a rerun of his country's brutal recent history. "There is no doubt that our neighbors interfered in Afghanistan and did it forcefully. But there is no doubt we [Afghans] facilitated that interference," Karzai says. "If we would not have allowed those countries to interfere in our affairs, they would have never been able to interfere. Afghan politicians and elders can prove that such intrusion in Afghanistan's affairs is impossible." The major test for Karzai now is to maintain his hold on the shaky administration and political system he heads. And as the release on November 24 of contentious results from the country's fraud-tainted parliamentary elections suggests, doing so promises to be increasingly challenging. |
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| AntiWar.com Warns Against Deals With Taliban, Withdrawing Occupation Forces by Jason Ditz, November 28, 2010 A new report by the International Crisis Group was released today, ostensibly to “remind policymakers of the deep problems that exist in Afghanistan,” but also laying the ground for an open-ended continuation of the Afghan War by overtly condemning all notions of ending the conflict. The details of the war situation in the report are quite true, reporting that “there is little evidence that the operations have disrupted the insurgency’s momentum” and by and large declaring the war an enormous failure. Bizarrely, though, the ICG report then warns of “dire consequences” if the war is ever ended, despite conceding the dire consequences of the war continuing, and condemns the idea of negotiating any sort of peace deal with he Taliban. The report may be quite correct in concluding that the Karzai government would “collapse” without 150,000 NATO occupation troops there to prop them up, but given the government’s incompetence, the report refers for the government as “Kabul’s kleptocratic elites,” it seems difficult to understand what purpose the continuation of the war might serve. In the end the report seems to rehash all the bad things we already knew about the war, confirms that there are no “quick fixes” to these problems, but then also concludes ending the war “will not help Afghans” either and advocates the same status quo it readily admits is failing miserably. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz * Buying Influence: US Cash Key to Keeping Kyrgyzstan Base - November 28th, 2010 * Threats, Wargames Continue on Korean Peninsula - November 28th, 2010 * Israeli DM Gave US Until End of 2010 to 'Resolve' Iran Nuclear Program - November 28th, 2010 * Senators: Prosecute WikiLeakers - November 28th, 2010 * WikiLeaks Cablegate: An Overview - November 28th, 2010 |
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| International Crisis Group Asia Briefing N°115 28 Nov 2010 OVERVIEW U.S. military operations in Afghanistan are now entering their tenth year and policymakers in Washington are looking for a way out. A policy review is due in December but the outline is already clear: U.S. forces will try to pummel the Taliban to bring them to the table, responsibility for security will increasingly be transferred to Afghan forces and more money will be provided for economic development. NATO partners agreed at the Lisbon summit to a gradual withdrawal of combat troops with the goal of transitioning to full Afghan control of security by the end of 2014. The aim will be a dignified drawdown of troops as public support wanes while at the same time ensuring that a post-withdrawal Afghanistan, at the very least, does not become the epicentre of transnational terrorism. While success is being measured in numbers of insurgents killed or captured, there is little proof that the operations have disrupted the insurgency’s momentum or increased stability. The storyline does not match facts on the ground. The U.S. military is already touting successes in the area around Kandahar, the focus of the most recent fighting by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). President Hamid Karzai has established a “high peace council” to manage negotiations with the insurgents and greater efforts are planned for training the Afghan army and police. The U.S. and ISAF are only months away from declaring scores of districts safe for transition. An alluring narrative of a successful counter-insurgency campaign has begun to take shape. As violence has increased, the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) have proven a poor match for the Taliban. Casualties among Afghan and ISAF forces have spiked, as have civilian casualties. Afghanistan still lacks a cohesive national security strategy and the Afghan military and police remain dangerously fragmented and highly politicised. On the other side, despite heavy losses in the field, insurgent groups are finding new recruits in Pakistan’s borderlands, stretching from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to Balochistan, and using the region to regroup, reorganise and rearm, with the support and active involvement of al-Qaeda, Pakistani jihadi groups and the Pakistan military. This strategic advantage has allowed the insurgency to proliferate in nearly every corner of the country. Contrary to U.S. rhetoric of the momentum shifting, dozens of districts are now firmly under Taliban control. Nearly a decade after the U.S. engagement began, Afghanistan operates as a complex system of multi-layered fiefdoms in which insurgents control parallel justice and security organs in many if not most rural areas, while Kabul’s kleptocratic elites control the engines of graft and international contracts countrywide. The inflow of billions in international funds has cemented the linkages between corrupt members of the Afghan government and violent local commanders – insurgent and criminal, alike. Economic growth has been tainted by the explosion of this black market, making it nearly impossible to separate signs of success and stability from harbingers of imminent collapse. The neglect of governance, an anaemic legal system and weak rule of law lie at the root of these problems. Too little effort has been made to develop political institutions, local government and a functioning judiciary. Insurgents and criminal elements within the political elite have as a result been allowed to fill the vacuum left by the weak Afghan state. Successive U.S. administrations deserve much of the blame for this state of affairs. From the start the policy was untenable; selecting some of the most violent and corrupt people in the country, stoking them up with suitcases of cash and promises of more to come and then putting them in charge was never a recipe for stability, never mind institution building. The leadership in Washington has consistently failed to develop and implement a coherent policy. The shift of resources and attention from Afghanistan to Iraq almost immediately after the Taliban were first driven from Kabul also underscored a lack of strategic priority. The absence of policy coherence between Washington and its NATO allies early on was replicated by sharp divisions between civilian and military leaders – as reflected in the starkly opposed opinions of the Pentagon and the U.S. embassy in Kabul on the best way forward; most recently evidenced in the departure of General Stanley McChrystal. Measuring inputs rather than outcomes has allowed bureaucrats to trumpet illusory successes. Policymaking has been haphazard, based on the premise that if a bad idea is revived often enough, it might eventually work. Plans for reintegrating the Taliban and establishing local police militias have come and gone and come again with no positive results. Attempts at reconciliation have resulted, likewise, in little more than talk about talks. Real work to build a capable police and military only began in 2008. Despite endless pledges to restore the rule of law, efforts to provide Afghans with rudimentary justice have barely started. The international community has repeatedly failed to acknowledge the link between stability and justice, though it has long been evident that grievances against predatory government actors are driving the insurgency. All of these problems have led many to believe it is time for the foreign forces to leave. Unfortunately, a rush to the exit will not help Afghans nor will it address the very real regional and global security concerns posed by the breakdown of the Afghan state. Without outside support, the Karzai government would collapse, the Taliban would control much of the country and internal conflict would worsen, increasing the prospects of a return of the destructive civil war of the 1990s. Even a partial Taliban victory would provide succour and a refuge for Pakistani jihadi groups. That could intensify violence in Pakistan and increase attacks on India. Afghanistan’s neighbours would step up support for their proxies, injecting military resources, financing and new energy into the war. As conflict spreads – along with refugees, jihadis and other problems – the situation would be well beyond the control of a few drone strikes. This paper is aimed at reminding policymakers of the deep problems that exist in Afghanistan. Any plan that fails to deal with the decay in Kabul will not succeed. President Hamid Karzai no longer enjoys the legitimacy and popularity he once had and he has subsequently lost his ability to stitch together lasting political deals. Despite the rhetoric surrounding reconciliation, Karzai is in no position to act alone as a guarantor for the interests of the Afghan state. In the current political context, negotiations with the insurgents stand a slim chance of success. Instead, the key to fighting the insurgency and bringing about the conditions for a political settlement lies in improving security, justice and governance and, as previous Crisis Group reports have shown, there are few quick fixes in these areas. Kabul/Brussels, 28 November 2010 |
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| The Huffington Post Dr. Charles G. Cogan Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Posted: November 29, 2010 10:16 AM To paraphrase Wikipedia, bait and switch is a term of commerce whereby the customer is lured into buying a low-price item only to be told when he comes to the store that the item is not available at the original price. Wikipedia concludes with the observation that "the use of this term was extended to similar situations outside the marketing sense." And so it is with Afghanistan. On December 1, 2009, President Obama told West Point cadets that "in eighteen months our troops will begin to come home." That was part of the dialectical formulation that accompanied the President's second surge in Afghanistan: the 30,000 additional troops would be sent in, but the withdrawal of the troops would begin in July 2011. In the November 19th communiqué of the summit meeting of NATO in Lisbon, the idea that American troops will begin to come home in July 2011 seems to have gone away. Instead there is mention of a "transition" to Afghan forces which is going to begin in some provinces at the start of 2011. The transition involving all the provinces is to be completed by the end of 2014, at which time the US-NATO mission presumably is to be terminated. Earlier, on November 17th, the NATO representative in Kabul, Mark Sedwill, stated that the target of handing over security responsibilities to the Afghan army and police by the end of 2014 might not be met. Sedwill, the civilian counterpart to the U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus, stated that "eye-watering" levels of violence could happen after foreign combat troops withdraw from Afghanistan in four years' time. One can argue that beginning a troop withdrawal is different from completing the mission, but the reality is that the idea of withdrawal of American troops beginning in July 2011 has been air-brushed out of NATO pronouncements. The American military never liked the formulation anyway, under the reasoning that the Taliban could simply wait out the departure of the foreign troops and then move in from Pakistan and retake the country. In sum, the military appears to have made its point with the President. Ward State: Afghanistan was a matter of strategic interest to the United States during the Cold War, especially after it became the first country outside the USSR's orbit to be invaded by Soviet troops. The Afghan mujahidin drove them out after a ten-year occupation, helped by some two billion dollars in joint American and Saudi covert assistance. There were no American military casualties. With the end of the Cold War, and the escape of al-Qaeda into Pakistan in late 2001, Afghanistan has been no longer a major strategic interest of America. Instead it has become a ward state, going into its eleventh year. If this long and possibly open-ended commitment continues (hopefully not), we may see a remake of 1952 when a (Republican) presidential candidate comes along and promises to end the war...And he does. |
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| The New York Times December 16, 2010 Afghan Report Exposes a Split Over Pullout Timelines By ALISSA J. RUBIN KABUL, Afghanistan — The White House report on Afghan strategy released Thursday was notable as much for what it did not say as for what it did. It reports some real military gains, but acknowledges that they remain fragile and that NATO troops will need more time to achieve their goals. However, that progress has come only by adding more troops in key areas, and the fierce debate to come will be over whether any troops can be subtracted without undermining that progress. Already, parts of the country with fewer troops are showing a deterioration of security, and the gains that have been made were hard won, coming at the cost of a third more casualties among NATO forces this year. Then there are the starkly different timelines being used in Washington and on the ground. President Obama is on a political timetable, needing to assure a restless public and his political base that a withdrawal is on track to begin by the deadline he set of next summer and that he can show measurable success before the next election cycle. Afghanistan, and the American military, are running on a different clock, based on more intractable realities. Some of the most stubborn and important scourges they face — ineffectual governance, deep-rooted corruption and the lack of a functioning judicial system — the report barely glanced at. “We have metrics that show increased progress,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul. “But those positives are extremely fragile because we haven’t done enough about governance, about corruption. 2010 was supposed to be a year of change, but it has not changed as much as we hoped.” In government, improvement was spotty at best. NATO commanders still fight tooth and nail with Afghan officials in Kabul to remove corrupt district governors, or to retain honest ones. Often they fail. The same goes for police chiefs and other law enforcement officials. In the WikiLeaks cables released in the past several weeks, diplomats described pitched efforts to retain an effective governor in Helmand Province over the objections of President Hamid Karzai, who wanted to replace him with a tribal power broker with unsavory connections. The governor, Gulab Mangal, kept his job but only because of a concerted effort by the British, backed up by NATO allies. A fundamental conundrum, unmentioned in the report, is that the United States and its NATO allies constantly speak of Mr. Karzai and his government as an ally and a partner and try to shore up his image as the leader of his people. Yet many Afghans view his government as a cabal of strongmen, who enrich themselves and their families at the expense of the country. By identifying themselves with Mr. Karzai, the United States risks being seen as endorsing the culture of warlords and approving of the enrichment of a privileged few while much of the rest of the country lives in penury. As September’s parliamentary elections suggested, many Afghans are so disillusioned with the government that they harbor doubt that even the idea of a government — any government — is worth supporting. Fewer than a third of eligible voters cast ballots in the elections, and there was so much fraud that the proportion is likely to have been even lower. The candidates that Mr. Karzai supported did less well than expected, raising further questions about whether he is losing his base — and by extension, whether the United State is losing its. A recent American military focus on blacklisting Afghan contractors who officials believe are paying bribes is an important change that could put the United States on the side of more respected actors rather than those viewed as swindlers, several military experts said. One of the blacklisted contractors, Al Watan Risk, a security company that is owned by two cousins of Mr. Karzai’s, is alleged to have paid Afghan officials and Taliban commanders to keep routes safe for NATO supply convoys. If so, that meant that American taxpayer dollars helped to finance the Taliban. By halting the security contract, the United States sent a signal that it is willing to draw a line that even relatives of the president would not be allowed to cross. “The blacklisting of Al Watan Risk got a lot less attention than it deserved,” said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Biddle said that such actions would in the long term help improve governance. But he cautioned that in the short term, if the Americans could not rely on the private security companies to keep the peace, they would have to “backfill the security gap themselves,” and that could prolong the amount of time they need to root out the Taliban. “I don’t see any way to do that other than gradually,” he said. Also largely glossed over in the report is the extent and implications of pervasive corruption. Bribery and nepotism remain a feature of daily life for the vast majority of Afghans, and nowhere is it more clear than in the judicial system. In most of Afghanistan, the police, prosecutors, judges and jailers can be bought. The government talks about the need to wipe out corruption, but at the highest levels it has done little since last summer when Mr. Karzai became infuriated by the efforts of an Afghan anticorruption task force to prosecute his chief of administration for the national security council. Taken together, the lack of justice remains a major recruiting tool for the Taliban. And, according to a report released this week by Chatham House, a British research institute, corruption is “also implicated in the increasing spread of the insurgency outside its southern Pashtun base.” The elephant in the room is that whatever the trajectory of the war, the Afghan government does not envision a defeat of the Taliban, but a negotiated peace. Unmentioned in the report is what the Americans may be looking for in such a deal, and what they are willing to do to bring that peace. Rod Nordland contributed reporting. |
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| AP – Thu Dec 16, 12:33 pm ET WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the pace for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan depends on conditions on the ground there. He says that as Afghan security forces continue to improve, the U.S. drawdown will accelerate. [ For complete coverage of politics and policy, go to Yahoo! Politics ] Gates said Thursday that strengthening Afghan forces and weakening the Taliban is "the path out." U.S. troops will begin to leave Afghanistan in July, according to a new government review of the war. That's the same timeline that President Barack Obama promised one year ago. But the scope and pace of the withdrawal remain unclear. |
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| Washington Post "44" Politics & Policy in Obama's Washington Posted at 12:34 PM ET, 12/19/2010 Biden: We'll be out of Afghanistan by 2014 'come hell or high water' (Sunday show roundup) By Feliciia Sonmez and Emi Kolawole NBC: MEET THE PRESS Biden: We'll be out of Afghanistan by 2014 "come hell or high water" Asked whether the United States was winning or losing in Afghanistan, Vice President Joe Biden said that "we're making progress on all fronts, more on some areas than in others." He contended that the July 2011 troop reductions will be "more than token," adding, "We are starting it in July 2011 and we are going to be totally out of there, come hell or high water, by 2014." Biden also said he believes that there are enough votes in the Senate to ratify the New START nuclear arms treaty with Russia. And he noted that he would consider WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a criminal "if he conspired to get these classified documents." Biden praised the Senate's passage of the tax-cut deal negotiated between President Obama and congressional Republicans, pushing back against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's ® claim last week that the deal didn't bring an end to economic uncertainty. "Had we kicked this into next year, it would have created such uncertainty," Biden said. Asked about a September interview in which he had said the administration would draw the line on the upper-income tax cuts extension, Biden responded: "We did go to the mat. ... We got to the end, we couldn't get it done and we had to make a decision." Biden did not commit either way as to whether the president would veto any bill with earmarks. "If we say we have to appropriate a levee in Mississippi" in order to retain spending to "keep my kid alive" in Iraq or Afghanistan, then Biden said he would support the president's signing of a bill with earmarks. CNN: STATE OF THE UNION McConnell: We'll fund the government through March Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that he found working with President Obama on the bipartisan tax-cut package "just fine," noting that the deal contained many Republican-supported line-items. McConnell also said that conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer was "totally wrong" in calling Obama the new "comeback kid." On last week's battle in the Senate over the omnibus spending bill, McConnell refused to say that his party was "buckling to the tea party." "The public is sick and tired of doing business that way," he said. McConnell also confirmed that he and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had agreed on a continuing resolution that would fund the government through March. McConnell would not commit to whether the New START Treaty would come up for a vote during the current lame-duck session or whether there were enough votes within the Republican caucus to advance it toward ratification. Asked where he saw another opportunity to work with the president, McConnell said he would "love to sit down with the administration" to work on entitlement reform. FOX: FOX NEWS SUNDAY Kyl: Obama should "send a letter to the Russians" on START Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) faced off on the remaining issues facing the lame-duck Congress. Durbin said that he believes he has the 67 votes necessary to ratify the New START Treaty. Kyl reiterated his opposition to the treaty and said that President Obama should "send a letter to the Russians," not the Senate, on the issue of missile defense. Kyl said that he remains "skeptical" about a bill that would guarantee health benefits for 9/11 first responders. Durbin said that he believed the bill would pass but acknowledged that he didn't know where the White House stood on it. On the Senate's passage of a bill repealing "don't ask, don't tell," Kyl said that the military has "one function, and that is to fight and to fight well and maybe to die. And the people who are responsible for that need to make the judgment about whether this will inhibit their ability to carry out that ultimate job that we ask them to do." Durbin countered that "each political generation has very few, but a few, opportunities to extend justice in America. That was our chance yesterday in repealing 'don't ask, don't tell.'" Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell ® said that he didn't think the recent decisions of three federal judges regarding the federal health care overhaul were political. McDonnell added that he supports having the legal battle over aspects of the health care overhaul "fast-tracked to the United States Supreme Court," skipping the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. ABC: THIS WEEK Kerry: START Treaty has enough votes for ratification Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry said that he believes the New START Treaty has enough votes for ratification in the Senate. Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar said that he agreed with Kerry and believed that "several" Republicans will support the treaty, although "the problem is really getting to that final vote." Kerry said that he believes the controversy over the outing of a CIA station chief in Pakistan will not be "a major setback." Lugar said regarding Pakistan, "all we can do, we are trying very hard diplomatically, a five-year program, because it is critical. If the al-Qaida are over there and the Taliban go back and forth, things are not going to continue to work well in parts of Afghanistan without change." Kerry also said that the Senate's passage of a bill repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" law "fulfills an enormous promise of equality in our country." Lugar defended his "no" vote, saying that he remains concerned about implementation. C-SPAN: NEWSMAKERS Ron Paul: No guarantee I'll subpoena Bernanke Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul said that his appointment to the chairmanship of the Financial Services Committee's Subcommittee on Monetary Policy "gives me a better platform" on monetary issues. "That doesn't mean the first week in January I send a subpoena for [Federal Reserve chairman Ben] Bernanke," he added. Paul maintained that in a system with a free market-based currency there would be no boom-and-bust cycle. "The Federal Reserve provides no real benefits to us long-term," he insisted. On the subject of economic crises, Paul said the government's response is "exactly like a drug addiction. ... I don't think we need regulators; we need law and order. We need people to fulfill their contracts. The market is a great regulator." Paul said that people look for him to be "very, very critical" when it comes to assessing Bernanke and the Fed. Whether Bernanke is a better or worse manager than former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan "won't make a difference," he added. "You have to analyze the whole philosophy of the monetary system. ... This is the problem rather than Bernanke himself." CBS: FACE THE NATION Graham: New Congress is "going to be a test of the tea party" South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said he won't vote for the New START Treaty and doesn't believe the agreement has enough votes for ratification in the Senate. "I'm not going to vote for START until I hear from the Russians that they understand we can develop four stages of missile defense, and if we do, they won't withdraw from the treaty," Graham said. Michigan Democratic Sen. Carl Levin argued that not ratifying the treaty will "damage national security." He also pushed back against the notion that there hasn't been enough debate, saying that previous treaties "have not had longer debates than the two weeks, which we've devoted to this treaty." Asked whether Pakistan is "with us or against us," Levin responded: "Yes." Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar predicted that the Senate will "eventually" ratify the START Treaty. Graham said that the 112th Congress is "going to be a test of the tea party," while Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions predicted that in the new Congress, "the House is going to submit a very lean, tight, tough budget. And the Senate is going to have a real difficult time accommodating the challenges that we face." By Feliciia Sonmez and Emi Kolawole | December 19, 2010; 12:34 PM ET |
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| The Huffington Post Sam Stein stein@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting First Posted: 01- 2-11 11:33 AM | Updated: 01- 2-11 11:59 AM NEW HAVEN -- There was, with really no notable exception, an absence of discussion of the Afghanistan war during the course of the 2010 campaign. But that may have been more a product of the electoral landscape (congressional races often don't lend themselves to foreign policy debates) and strategic timelines (the start date for withdrawal begins in July 2011) than anything else. And, indeed, during an interview Sunday morning, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) provided some indication that Republicans would push U.S. permanency in Afghanistan in the years ahead, insisting that it would be "enormously beneficial" to show that type of force "in perpetuity." "I think it would be enormously beneficial to the region as well as Afghanistan," Graham said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We have had air bases all over the world and a couple of air bases in Afghanistan would allow the Afghan security forces an edge against the Taliban in perpetuity. It would be a signal to Pakistan that the Taliban are never going to come back. In Afghanistan they could change their behavior. It would be a signal to the whole region that Afghanistan is going to be a different place. "And if the Afghan people want this relationship, they are going to have to earn it. But I hope that they will seek a relationship with the United States so we can have an enduring relationship, economic and militarily and politically, and a couple of air bases in Afghanistan will give us an edge military, give the Afghan security forces an edge militarily to ensure that the country never goes back into the hands of the Taliban, which would be a stabilizing event throughout the whole region." WATCH: The word choice here by Graham may be a bit more dramatic than the policy prescription. The United States, as he noted, does have bases in Germany and Japan more than half-a-century after World War II ended. But the notion that the U.S. imprint in Afghanistan will last as long as those two is something that America does not appear comfortable swallowing. Even President Obama has avoided talking about troop presences in those terms, saying only that a NATO contingent would remain in Afghanistan "long-term." |
