In Afghanistan, Hagel Presses for Pact on Security, but Is Not Meeting Karzai
By THOM SHANKER and AZAM AHMED Published: December 7, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel arrived in the Afghan capital on Saturday, where he conferred with top security officials but consciously chose not to see President Hamid Karzai, whose decision to delay signing a security agreement with the United States has left the future of the American military mission here in doubt.
Mr. Hagel met with the Afghan defense minister, Bismillah Mohammadi Khan, and the deputy interior minister, Mohammad Ayub Salangi. Mr. Hagel said the defense minister expressed enthusiastic support for the bilateral security agreement and predicted that it “would be signed, and would be signed in a very timely manner.”
But Mr. Karzai’s refusal to finalize the pact without further amendments has frustrated the Americans, who had insisted on a deal by the end of this year to allow the military time to reorganize for a revised role when the NATO combat mission here ends in December 2014.
“I never asked for a meeting with President Karzai,” Mr. Hagel said. “I never received an invitation to meet with him. I didn’t expect a meeting with him. This trip is about the troops.”
Recent visits by the American national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, and the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, James Dobbins, failed to break the impasse with Mr. Karzai. Mr. Hagel said he thought the United States had said all it had to say to the Afghan president for now.
“I don’t think pressure coming from the United States, or more pressure, is going to be helpful in persuading President Karzai to sign a bilateral security agreement,” the defense secretary said.
Instead, Mr. Hagel argued that Mr. Karzai should sign the security pact because it had been endorsed by a council of tribal elders convened by Mr. Karzai and is overwhelmingly supported by the Afghan people.
After months of haggling, false starts, potential dead-ends and delays, last month Mr. Karzai submitted the bilateral security agreement to the council of elders, which approved the document.
Then, he said he might not sign the agreement until after the election of his successor, next April, and imposed new conditions on American and allied military actions, including an immediate and total ban on counterterrorism raids by American forces on Afghan homes. He has also mentioned freeing prisoners held by the United States at Guantánamo Bay as a condition for signing the agreement.
In recent days, senior American administration officials have suggested that Mr. Karzai did not need to sign the security agreement personally, but that it could be endorsed by another Afghan official, like the defense minister. Mr. Karzai has ruled out that option, saying through his spokesman that no minister would sign it without his authorization, which he would give only if his demands were satisfied.
“Keep in mind the other U.S. officials who came to Afghanistan to discuss the bilateral security agreement and request its finalization,” said Mohammad Farhad Azimi, a member of Parliament from Balkh Province. “The president did not agree to those requests.”
Mr. Karzai also remains unconvinced that there is a firm date by which the document must be signed, said Aimal Faizi, his spokesman. “We believe there’s no deadline,” Mr. Faizi said, adding, “It’s more a tactical maneuver to put pressure on President Karzai to sign it as soon as possible.”
The conditions, Mr. Faizi said, included a halt to all raids on Afghan homes and villages and American help in getting “Afghanistan launched on the peace process.” He said that a “meaningful start” would include “arranging meetings between High Peace Council officials and senior Taliban officials.”
It also would mean gaining freedom for the Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a former top deputy to Mullah Muhammad Omar, who was captured in Pakistan .. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/asia/16intel.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 .. by a joint Pakistani and American force, Mr. Faizi said. “We believe that on both these conditions the United States can deliver,” Mr. Faizi said.
The Americans may have some leeway on counterterrorism strikes, but Western diplomats say they are concerned that the demands for meaningful progress on the peace process could be drawn out for many months, leaving the United States endlessly trying to reach a moving goal line.
Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the senior NATO and American commander in Afghanistan, said late Saturday that he was continuing to plan for a continued military presence to train, advise and assist Afghan forces after 2014.
But he warned that if the agreement was not signed by the end of this year, he would have no choice but to begin “more detailed planning on some other reality,” a nod to the so-called zero option with no foreign troops remaining.
General Dunford said delays into next year might also prevent smaller allied nations from generating the political will domestically to devote the money and personnel to an enduring military presence in Afghanistan.
The standoff over signing the bilateral security accord, General Dunford said, is complicating more than the logistics of moving weapons and personnel; the delays are shaking the confidence of the Afghan people in their own future, an assessment borne out by interviews with Kabul business leaders, local merchants and elected officials.
Prices for staple goods, like firewood and fuel, have started to creep higher as the local currency drops in response to the uncertainty.
“Right now we are in a crisis, prices have skyrocketed,” said Dr. Naqibullah Fayeq, a member of Parliament from Faryab Province. “There are many other problems. It is turning into a tragedy.”
Perhaps with that concern in mind, Mr. Karzai’s spokesman emphasized that Mr. Karzai was in favor of the security agreement, just that he was not yet ready to sign it.
Hamid Karzai is leaving a sorry legacy for Afghanistan
DateFebruary 10, 2014
If the Afghan President doesn't act decisively his country could be forced into a more parlous state, writes Amin Saikal.
[ oops, mine won't copy the Address (URL) ] Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Photo: Reuters
There is an Afghan saying that the man has thrown a punch but does not know how to get out of it. This is where President Hamid Karzai has placed himself in relation to the US, the power behind his throne for the past 12 years.
Karzai has negotiated a bilateral security agreement with the US, but has so far refused to sign it. Yet he is under enormous pressure from inside Afghanistan and from the US and its allies to ratify it before he steps down following the Afghan presidential election on April 5. His difficulty is that if he signs it he will lose face, and if he doesn't there are serious implications for himself and Afghanistan. What has brought him to this point?
Karzai took nearly two years to negotiate the bilateral security agreement with the Obama administration in order to enable the US to keep a residual force for training and anti-terrorism purposes in Afghanistan beyond the withdrawal of most NATO troops from the country by the end of this year. He even convened a hand-picked loya jirga (the traditional Afghan grand assembly), which approved the agreement last November.
Yet he has decided not to sign the agreement until Washington agrees to ensure Afghanistan's security, to prevent its forces from violating Afghan houses and killing Afghan civilians and to be totally transparent and inclusive of the Afghan government in its negotiations with the Taliban for a political settlement. Otherwise, he has vowed to leave the responsibility for signing the agreement to his successor.
The irony is Karzai had all the opportunity in the world to raise these issues during the course of negotiating the agreement, which is not a treaty and does not oblige the US to defend Afghanistan in the event of outside aggression. Four considerations appear to have dominated his thinking as he approaches the end of his two constitutional terms in office. The first is his concern about how to protect his own future and that of his family, more important his brothers, who have formed the ''Karzai cartel'' and amassed a huge amount of wealth through mostly unsavoury deals during Karzai's presidency.
He wants to lock his successor into the agreement as a way of making him take responsibility for Karzai's legacy of failure in bringing stability and security to Afghanistan, and establishing good governance.
The second is to present himself as an Afghan nationalist and remove the stigma that has dogged him for so long as one empowered by the US and its allies. He is acutely aware of how the Afghan people have viewed as foreign puppets some of his predecessors, particularly Shah Shujah Durrani, who was enthroned by the British from 1839 to 1842, and Babrak Karmal and Najibullah, who assumed consecutively the Communist leadership of Afghanistan at the behest of the occupying Soviet power in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Karzai wants to be remembered as an Afghan hero who stood up to the very power that enabled him to assume the helm of Afghan politics.
The third is that he has genuinely become distrustful of the Obama administration, as the latter is of him. He has especially been irritated by Washington's secret dealings with the Taliban and its refusal to do enough to hit the insurgents' sanctuaries in Pakistan rather than focusing most of its military operations on Afghanistan at the cost of avoidable civilian casualties. The now released memoirs of former US secretary of defence Robert Gates detailing Obama's dislike of Karzai and Obama's purported lack of serious commitment to the Afghan war can only reinforce Karzai's distrust of Obama and Washington policymakers.
The fourth is that he thinks by resisting signing the agreement he can raise his credentials in the eyes of the Taliban and their affiliates, so that they could negotiate with his government directly rather than through Washington. Although his efforts have not produced any tangible results, as the Taliban are in no rush, there are reports of secret talks. Meanwhile, unless he succeeds in striking a political settlement that has the support of a cross-section of the Afghan mosaic society over the next few weeks, time is not on his side.
Karzai knows that if the agreement is not signed, it could disastrously affect Western military, economic and financial aid to Afghanistan, without which the country would have no other source of substantial income.
Afghanistan is dependent on foreign aid for 90 per cent of its annual revenue. It needs at least $8 billion in military and economic assistance a year if it is to stand a chance of maintaining its present situation: fragile and insecure, but nonetheless with a possibility of keeping the Taliban and their affiliates at bay.
Karzai has increasingly become concerned about his position and his legacy - something he should have thought about from the time he assumed political leadership on the back of US power.
Karzai now thinks he is in a stronger bargaining position than President Obama, and that neither the US nor its NATO allies want to see their project become a total failure. So he is happy to posture for as long as possible. At the end he may find he has little choice but to sign the agreement as there is no other power that could replace the US and its allies.
Amin Saikal is professor of political science and director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University.
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