In March, 2009, US President B. Obama announced a plan to withdraw the US forces from Afghanistan in 2011-2014. In the meantime, though, the US troops in the country grew in size to reach 100,000 by the spring of 2011, and the actual preparations for the withdrawal began in February, 2011 after US Vice President J. Biden's Kabul tour which marked a pivotal point in Washington's relations with Afghanistan.
A series of developments that took place over the past several months in Afghanistan added uncertainties to the situation around the US withdrawal from the country. The US special forces killed Usama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011, but the raid triggered a string of political assassinations in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's deputy police minister Gen. Mohammed Daoud Daoud who was in charge of counter-narcotics operations died in a suicide attack on May 28. An investigation conducted by Afghan law-enforcement agencies showed that the kamikaze in the case was a militant from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan which is notorious for close links with Al Qaeda. Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan president H. Karzai and Kandahar Provincial Council chairman, was shot dead by his own bodyguard on July 12. The victim had a spotty reputation and was known to run the province as a completely lawless territory. He was widely suspected of maintaining ties with the drug mafia, illegally seizing lands to rent them out to Western companies, and distorting the outcome of the 2009 presidential elections in the southern part of Afghanistan. The Talibs claimed responsibility for the murder of A. Karzai, but no official version of the incident was released, prompting speculations about numerous players that stood to benefit from the plot. Afghanistan's former president Prof. Burhanuddin Rabbani was killed on September, 20. Rabbani led the opposition in the Afghan parliament and chaired the country's Consultative Peace Jirga, a body established to draw the Talibs into reconciliation talks. The murder of Rabbani, for which Jalaluddin Haqqani's group of insurgents declared being responsible, was a clear attempt to derail the negotiating process, to cause a broad escalation in Afghanistan, and to reignite the conflict between the Afghan Tajiks and the northern minorities supporting them, on the one side, and the Pashtuns, on the other. Afghan president H. Karzai stated on September 29 that he would not deal with the Talibs and would switch to Pakistan as the negotiating partner.
The Talibs similarly target the US forces in Afghanistan. On September 11, roughly when President Obama indicated he was open to negotiations with the insurgents, a blast shattered a US military base in the Wardak Province, injuring 77 US servicemen. On September 22, the US embassy in Kabul came under attack which US ambassador R. Crocker attributed to Haqqani's group.
The conclusion stemming from the above survey is that the insurgents in Afghanistan managed to retain considerable military potential. Keeping the Afghan government and its Western partners at gunpoint, they make the latter expedite the withdrawal in the hope to impose their terms on the former in the negotiations which they have preferred to avoid so far.
Under the circumstances, Washington chose to offer H. Karzai a deal defining the format and status of the US presence in Afghanistan following the pledged withdrawal. While President Obama is facing public pressure to complete the pullout as quickly as possible (mid-summer polls showed that 56% of the US population opposed further stay of the US forces in Afghanistan), H. Karzai and his administration are increasingly vocal about their worries that, absent the West's military support, the country would easily revert to the state of civil war and re-emerge as a source of a regional threat.
A new strategic US-Afghan partnership agreement was on the table during the talks which opened in March, 2011, part of the purpose being to enable the US military and civilian specialists and formations – the US intelligence operatives, air force, etc. - to work in Afghanistan after 2014. Kabul rejected the US draft agreement citing its loose wording and suggested a detailed alternative, the key point being that the US servicemen in Afghanistan would have to obey the Afghan legislation. Karzai's foreign-policy adviser Dr. Rangin Dadfar Spanta stressed that there should be no parallel arrangements and the parameters of the deal must fit fully with Afghanistan's constitution. Karzai said in April he would convene the loya jirga to hold debates over Afghanistan's strategic partnership with the US. The US-Afghan talks resumed in June, but the lengthy discussions failed to produce a document both sides could subscribe to.
One of the issues over which, by the way, the Afghan administration is divided, is the future of the military bases where the US forces are currently deployed. Slain A. Karzai held that allowing the US to operate the bases on a permanent basis would shield Afghanistan from its potentially intrusive neighbors. The ranks of current proponents of the view include Afghanistan's defense minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, former vice president Ahmad Zia Massoud, former national security chief Amrullah Saleh, and former police minister Hanif Atmar. In contrast, the position taken by Afghan military commander and first vice president Field Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim is that the whole nation must be invited to a debate on the issue.
The problem of the status of the US military bases in Afghanistan already evokes serious concerns in the neighboring countries. Tehran came up with a strong statement against the perpetuation of the existence of US military bases in Iran's proximity. Russia, India, and China also sent a message to Kabul that the idea was not to their liking.
Overall, the US withdrawal began under challenging conditions, and Washington is leaving Afghanistan with a bulk of unresolved problems. The Talibs and their allies are still strong in the country, and the military methods on which G. Bush's Administration relied heavily have proved inefficient. As a result, Washington simply has to talk to the Talibs, but uncertainties abound down the road as it is impossible to predict what exactly awaits Afghanistan in the wake of the US withdrawal. Pervasive corruption, rampant drug trafficking, untamed power of warlords and organized criminal groups, and outrageous levels of unemployment are parts of the picture across today's Afghanistan.
It may be a realistic hypothesis that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is not going to be total: the combat forces are back to the US, but the US military presence in the country is bound to persist. The October, 2011 tour of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan by US Secretary of State H. Clinton provided evidence that seems to reinforce the view. The complexity of H. Clinton's mission peaked in Islamabad where she tried to cool the tensions between the US and Pakistan caused by the raid during which bin Laden was gunned down (the operation was seen in Pakistan as an offense against its sovereignty). H. Clinton credited Pakistan with playing a key role in the Afghan settlement and urged it to both crack down on its home extremists and to contribute to stabilizing Afghanistan.
When H. Clinton was in Kabul, the theme was the bilateral strategic agreement promised by B. Obama and H. Karzai back in May, 2010. As before, no compromise was reached on the terms of lease of the Afghan military bases to the US following 2014.
The subjects of H. Clinton's talks in Dushanbe and Tashkent – the involvement of the Central Asian republics in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, human rights, and religious freedoms - were essentially traditional. A fresh idea that was thrown and then given the key line on the agenda of the November 2, Istanbul conference eloquently titled Security and Cooperation in the Heart of Asia was to create a modern edition of the historic Silky Way. The forum attracted delegations from Russia, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, China, India, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.
The implementation of the new Silky Way plan, upon scrutiny, would help the US to preserve political and other types of dominance in the region after the 2014 completion of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and would enable Washington to sideline in it Russia, China, and the increasingly assertive Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The impression is that the design is an updated version of G. Bush's Greater Central Asia plan which, despite being renamed, reflects the US pursuit of the same objective of gaining direct access to the region's natural resources via routes bypassing Russia. As an addition, Washington is making efforts to get NATO entrenched in Central Asia.
The US plan, though, appeared doomed to failure from the outset. Pakistan said a fairly firm No to it, as focusing on the already formulated development and security programs would be wiser than inventing extra cooperation mechanisms. Russia, China, and Iran expressed similar reservations. The main result at the bottom line of the Istanbul conference seems to be that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization intends to expand at an accelerated pace by integrating India and Pakistan as full-fledged members.
As for the US withdrawal, it will likely render more challenging the security problem confronting Afghanistan and its neighbors rather than bring about its viable resolution.
