U.S. may try to bypass Karzai on Afghan security deal
U.S. officials seeking to resolve a tense standoff with Afghan President Hamid Karzai were exploring on Tuesday whether they could bypass him and get other senior officials to sign a security deal authorizing American troops to remain in the country after 2014.
A day after Karzai abruptly said he would not sign unless Washington agreed to additional conditions, the Obama administration was pushing for Foreign Minister Zarar Ahmad Osmani or another official to endorse the agreement on behalf of the government in Kabul, Afghanistan, several U.S. officials said.
The Pentagon has been saying for months that it needs the security pact in place by the end of the year to give planners time to draft deployment schedules and secure funding for post-2014 operations.
Without a signed agreement, U.S. officials say, they will begin planning a complete withdrawal of the remaining 47,000 American troops next year. That means Afghanistan could be left to face a still-potent Taliban insurgency without substantial foreign military assistance.
Susan Rice, Obama’s national security advisor, told Afghanistan’s Tolo television station that it was not possible for the United States to postpone signing the deal until the spring, as Karzai has called for. She brushed aside Karzai’s call for the release of all Afghans held at the naval prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other demands.
“We’ve concluded the negotiations of the agreement,” Rice said at the end of a three-day visit to Kabul.
“We’re getting the text ready, and we’ll sign it at a high level,” an apparent acknowledgment that someone other than Karzai could sign for the Afghans.
But U.S. officials concede that the notion of bypassing Karzai poses enormous difficulties and is probably not a viable solution to the standoff unless Karzai himself accepts the idea.
Many believe Karzai is, in effect, calling Washington’s bluff, betting billions of dollars in international assistance that the U.S. does not want to leave Afghanistan.
His close aides have echoed that assessment through the recent days of diplomatic crisis. “We don’t believe there’s any zero option,” his spokesman, Aimal Faizi, said recently. But their optimism was not widely shared in Afghanistan on Tuesday, as Rice flew back to Washington with no promise of follow-up talks Karzai said he wanted to pursue.
Even many of Karzai’s friends were criticizing his refusal to conclude a deal.
Since Sunday, Karzai’s most high-profile critic has been a man widely considered to be his political mentor and godfather, Sibghatullah Mujadidi. Mujadidi, 89, was the chairman of the gathering of Afghan leaders, the loya jirga, that approved the security deal over the weekend and recommended that Karzai sign it by year’s end.
But when Karzai refused, and said he would continue negotiating with the Americans on new grounds, Mujadidi stunned the president by vowing to quit his government posts and go into exile if the agreement were not signed in the next few days.
“Unfortunately President Karzai did not see the interests of his country, and he’s trying to enforce his personal opinions and wrongheaded ideas on us,” Mujadidi said. “Becoming president made him prideful.”
Some Afghan officials worried that their president, who has made brinkmanship with the Americans his defining trait, had finally gone too far.
“Mark my words, if we do not sign this security agreement with the Americans, things will get worse than Iraq and the 1990s Afghan civil war,” said Sayed Ishaq Gailani, a member of Parliament from Paktika province. He urged the Americans to remember that “Karzai is not Afghanistan, he is just another individual, with illogical and illegal demands that are against all diplomatic norms.”
