A soldier delivered mail at a base in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, that is set to close in October.Credit
Shah Marai/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
WASHINGTON — President Obama may have ordered American warplanes back to Iraq,
but he has not changed his mind about his other big military
withdrawal. Mr. Obama told advisers this week that delaying the pullout
of American troops from Afghanistan would make no difference there as long as the country did not overcome its political rifts.
The
president, a senior administration official said, was rejecting a
growing chorus of arguments in Washington that the chaos in Iraq should
prompt him to reconsider his timetable for withdrawing the last soldiers
from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.
“People
have said, ‘Doesn’t this show that you should never take the troops out
of Afghanistan?’ ” said the official, speaking on the condition of
anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “He said, ‘No, it actually
points to the imperative of having political accommodation. There’s a
limit to what we can achieve absent a political process.’ ”
Mr.
Obama’s comments were particularly pointed, given that Afghanistan’s
leadership has been paralyzed for months after a disputed election to
replace President Hamid Karzai. The stalemate between the two
candidates, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, led to fears this week
that a cabal of Afghan government ministers with ties to the security
forces would seize power and install an interim government.
While
Secretary of State John Kerry has been most closely identified with
efforts to resolve the dispute — having parachuted into Kabul on two
occasions to try to broker a deal — Mr. Obama has telephoned Mr. Ghani
and Mr. Abdullah twice each to urge them to work out a compromise.
With
its ethnic overtones, the Afghan impasse has obvious parallels to the
sectarian rifts in Iraq, which have hindered the formation of a new
government and stoked the Islamic militancy there. Mr. Obama’s critics
have been quick to draw the comparison.
“I
predicted what was going to happen in Iraq,” Senator John McCain,
Republican of Arizona, said on CNN on Aug. 10. “I’m predicting to you
now that if we pull everybody out of Afghanistan, not based on
conditions, you’ll see that same movie again in Afghanistan.”
Not
all the criticism was partisan. Some veterans of the Obama
administration argued that the collapse of the Iraqi security forces and
the difficulty of forging political compromise in Baghdad were an
ominous sign for Afghanistan’s future after the United States departs.
“The
entire Afghanistan strategy is based on Iraq,” said Vali R. Nasr, a
former State Department official who worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan
policy. “This argument that we can stand up a military to do what we
ourselves can’t do hasn’t proven out in Iraq.”
Mr.
Nasr, now dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies, said the White House should leave behind a “credible force” to
prevent the Taliban from replicating the advances of the Sunni militant
group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and to give breathing space
to Afghanistan’s fragile political process.
Such
a force, he said, would be larger than the dwindling presence planned
by the administration — 9,800 troops in 2015, half that in 2016 and a
vestigial force thereafter — but far smaller than the 101,000 troops
that were in Afghanistan at the peak of American involvement in 2011.
These
arguments have registered in a White House confronting a cascade of
crises. While there have been no formal deliberations over Afghanistan
since the start of the airstrikes in Iraq, this official said, Mr. Obama
has discussed the parallels with his senior aides.
The
absence of political accommodation in both countries, the president
told them, sharply limits the United States’ ability to help. In
Afghanistan, even the presence of nearly 29,000 American soldiers has
done little to guide the country past its political crisis.
Mr.
Obama, his advisers note, did not pick the “zero option” in
Afghanistan, which would have meant withdrawing all troops at the end of
this year. The United States will marshal the support of NATO allies to
train and equip Afghan security forces. And the president’s personal
engagement in the issue since the June election is proof, they say, that
the United States is not going to stand by as Afghanistan unravels.
“There’s a middle ground between intervention and total disengagement,” the official said.
But
Mr. Obama also made clear, when he announced the timetable for drawing
down troops last May, that Afghanistan should not rely on the United
States to manage the creation of a more stable society. That was up to
its own security forces and elected officials, he said.
“We
have to recognize that Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and it
is not America’s responsibility to make it one,” the president said,
using language he has applied, almost word for word, to Iraq. “The
future of Afghanistan must be decided by Afghans.”
Afghanistan
is not the only ghost hanging over Mr. Obama’s decision to intervene in
Iraq. He himself has invoked the NATO air campaign in Libya in 2011 as
an example of the risks of a military intervention that is not backed up
with a sufficient political follow-through. The bombs drove Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi from power but left Libya in a lethal vacuum that has
been filled with feuding militant groups.
Mindful
of that, his advisers said, Mr. Obama has tried to keep the pressure on
Baghdad to form a government “front and center” and not define the new
mission as purely, or even primarily, a military one.
But
the president flatly rejects another assertion made by his critics:
that his refusal to supply weapons to moderate rebels in Syria, early
on, helped light the extremist fuse that exploded in Iraq. Without
knowing who the Syrian rebel groups were, officials said, funneling them
arms would not have prevented the rise of ISIS in Iraq.
For
Mr. Obama, some analysts said, the strongest link between Iraq and
Afghanistan is their place in the history of his presidency.
“Intellectually, he is beholden to the notion that his greatest legacy
is getting us out of those wars,” Mr. Nasr said.
copy http://www.nytimes.com/
Afghanistan orders US scribe to leave country
New York Times' Matthew Rosenberg asked to leave within 24 hours for report purported to be against 'national security'.
Last updated: 20 Aug 2014 12:54
NYT ran a story about officials planning to form an interim government before the vote audit results came [EPA]
Afghanistan has given New
York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg 24 hours to leave the
country for not cooperating with an investigation, a statement from
the attorney general's office has said.
Rosenberg had been
summoned to the attorney general's office for questioning on Tuesday
after the newspaper
ran a story about officials discussing plans to form an interim
government if a deadlock over the presidential election failed to be
broken soon.
The correspondent, who
has spent three years at the NYT bureau in Kabul, said on Wednesday that
the attorney general had not yet contacted him directly about the order
to leave.
"They had brought us
there under the guise of a kind of semi informal chat," Rosenberg said.
"It was kind of polite but insistent that we give them the names of our
sources."
Afghanistan is in the
midst of a ballot that has dragged on for months, with both candidates
claiming victory after the June 14 runoff, and allegations of mass fraud
threatening to derail the process.
The report is against
our national security because right now, the election problem is ongoing
and talks are at a very intricate stage.
Basir Azizi,
Spokesperson for Attorney General
"The report is
against our national security because right now, the election problem is
ongoing and talks are at a very intricate stage,"attorney general
spokesman Basir Azizi told Reuters news agency.
Earlier, Afghanistan
had banned Rosenberg from leaving the country pending investigation that saw
Washington seeeking "respect of fundamental freedoms of expression
and expression of the press".
A US State Department
spokeswoman Marie Harf urged the Afghan government "to respect
fundamental freedoms of expression and expression of the press, and we'll
continue to monitor it."
The United Nations is
supervising an audit of all eight million votes cast, but the process has
proceeded slowly as rival camps scrutinise each vote.
At the same time, members
of a joint-commission appointed by deadlocked candidates Abdullah Abdullah
and Ashraf Ghani are meeting to hammer out an agreement on a unity government
- as agreed in a deal brokered by the US Secretary of State John Kerry, who
has twice flown into Kabul since the run off.
International pressure is
building on Afghanistan to select the new president by the end of the month,
as the pullout of US-led NATO troops continues and Taliban rebels exploit
political inertia.
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