Did a Karzai No-Show Spoil Obama’s Announcement of End of Afghanistan War?

This post originally ran on Juan Cole’s Web page.

President Obama made a surprise trip to Afghanistan on Monday, for Memorial Day. But while the main impetus for his trip was to honor U.S. troops for their service there, he appears to have also tried to arrange a meeting with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. He issued an invitation for Karzai to join him at Bagram Air Base, but Karzai declined. I haven’t been able to find any sources I trust that confirm that Karzai was offended by being summoned to Bagram.

Obama wanted to meet with Karzai because the latter refuses to sign the Bilateral Security Agreement, which would lend a legal framework to the presence of a small contingent of U.S. troops after Dec. 31. Without the BSA, U.S. troops engaged in fighting with the Taliban could be charged with war crimes, since the UN Security Council will cease issuing permissions for international use of force in Afghanistan.

Presidential candidate and Karzai’s likely successor, Abdallah Abdallah, has said that he will sign the BSA the minute he is sworn in.

Tolo news in Afghanistan in Dari Persian noted: “Prior to this, the U.S. foreign secretary and the security national advisor of Obama had come to Afghanistan and held talks about the security pact. However, the talks did not apparently have the desirable results.” (h/t BBC Monitoring)

Obama and the Pentagon want the BSA signed sooner rather than later because they have to ship hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment back out of the country, along with all the remaining U.S. soldiers, by Dec. 31 if there will be no BSA. In the absence of confirmation, they must plan to bring it all out and everyone out. The logistics would be much easier if they knew that, e.g., there will be 5,000 U.S. troops in the country on Jan. 1.

But if Monday’s invitation was an Obama attempt to strong-arm Karzai, it seems to have gone badly awry.

Those Afghan politicians who want a continued U.S. troop presence, albeit a small one, are concerned to retain U.S. strategic investments in the country and foreign aid. Member of Parliament (MP) MP Shokria Barakzai said to Tolo News, “All the foreign assistance is like a switch. If it is turned off, we will go to darkness. So, we should not forget from where we have started and which country can donate five billion dollars in assistance [to Afghanistan] every year? No country is ready to do it.”

The Afghanistan national army cannot be paid for out of the current Afghanistan budget, and therefore the country needs outside monies just to keep its military paid and fed. Were the military to fall apart, the Taliban could well take over again.

Whether there are U.S. troops in Afghanistan matters. They could easily be ambushed and the U.S. could be dragged back into a hot war there.

The trip was in part about the politics of the treatment of veterans back in the U.S., with the Obama administration under fire for deficiencies in the Veterans Administration hospital system (deficiencies that have been there since before Obama but which have been exacerbated by the Bush wars and all the wounded vets they produced).

But it was also about U.S. foreign policy and the unsatisfactory relationship Karzai has with the US.

Afghanistan’s future and the future U.S. involvement there deserve a national debate that they are not getting in the U.S. It is as though Americans are finally taking W.’s advice not to pay any mind to his wars and just go shopping very seriously.

There is likely to be renewed Indo-Pak competition for Afghanistan, now that the Hindu nationalist BJP is ensconced. Does the U.S. want to be in the middle of that?

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