Handout/Getty Images - U.S. President Barack Obama exchanges documents with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai in a May 2, 2012 meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan. President Obama this week has a chance to explain to President Hamid Karzai and hopefully to the American people what will be our future role in Afghanistan.
President Obama this week has a chance to explain to President Hamid Karzai, and hopefully to the American people, what will be our future role in Afghanistan.
Most speculation has focused on how rapidly the remaining 60,000-plus U.S. combat troops will be withdrawn and how many will be permanently assigned there after 2014. But as the U.S. financial belt is being tightened, people want to know the financial cost, for how long and what will be accomplished.
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The fiscal 2013 Defense Authorization Act contains $4.7 billion for the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), an amount that the U.S. government can’t continue to expend. The House-Senate conferees on the bill, realizing that Afghan support must be reduced, called for an independent study of what size the ANSF should be to make certain that Afghanistan will not again serve as a training camp for terrorists. The Afghans cannot support the security forces that the United States and its allies have created. That means Washington will have to pay or get others to join in future funding of Kabul’s forces.
“There are no public U.S. plans that show how the Obama administration will deal with either the civil or military aspects of this transition between now and the end of 2014, or in the years that follow,” Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote last week. A former Pentagon official who has closely followed the 10- year war in Afghanistan, Cordesman questioned recent Pentagon statements of continuing successes, saying his reading of official reports shows “there has been no meaningful military progress since the end of 2010.”
He also wrote, “The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have never issued a remotely credible report on the progress and impact of the civilian surge or any aspect of the civil aid program.”
The real issue, Cordesman said, “is the future size of the civil-military effort, not the military effort alone. Any debate or analysis of the future U.S. role in Afghanistan that does not tie the two together is little more than intellectual and media rubbish.”
High on the Obama-Karzai agenda is a status-of-forces or similar agreement that would authorize a U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan after 2014. Discussions have been underway since November. One has to only look back at Iraq to see the pitfalls that may arise before the two sides can reach such an agreement. Not the least is getting an Afghan-U.S. guarantee over which country will exercise criminal jurisdiction over U.S. personnel and under what circumstances.
Karzai, who is set to give up the presidency next year, has his own wish list that seems to include a long-term U.S. presence, but under Afghan terms. He has a list that “he has enumerated for months in public speeches, including accusations that the United States has fomented corruption in Afghanistan and continues to violate the country’s sovereignty,” according to The Washington Post’s Kabul correspondent Kevin Sieff.
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