[Despite an American-led
training effort that has spanned years and cost tens of billions of dollars,
the Afghan security forces are still widely seen as riddled with dangerously
unreliable soldiers and police officers. The distrust has only deepened as a
pattern of attacks by Afghan security forces on American and NATO
service members, beginning years ago, has drastically worsened over the past
few days. A grenade attack on Sunday, apparently by a protester, wounded at
least six American soldiers. ]
By Matthew Rosenberg and Thom Shanker
WASHINGTON —
American officials sought to reassure both Afghanistan’s government
and a domestic audience on Sunday that the United States remained committed to
the war after the weekend killing of two American military officers
inside the Afghan Interior Ministry and days of deadly anti-American protests.
But behind the public
pronouncements, American officials described a growing concern, even at the
highest levels of the Obama administration and Pentagon, about the challenges
of pulling off a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan that hinges on the close
mentoring and training of army and police forces.
Despite an American-led
training effort that has spanned years and cost tens of billions of dollars,
the Afghan security forces are still widely seen as riddled with dangerously
unreliable soldiers and police officers. The distrust has only deepened as a
pattern of attacks by Afghan security forces on American and NATO
service members, beginning years ago, has drastically worsened over the past
few days. A grenade attack on Sunday, apparently by a protester, wounded at
least six American soldiers.
Nearly a week of violent
unrest after American personnel threw Korans into a pit of burning trash has
brought into sharp relief the growing American and Afghan frustration — and, at
times, open hostility — and the risks of a strategy that calls for American
soldiers and civilians to work closely with Afghans.
The United States now
has what one senior American official said was “almost no margin of error” in
trying to achieve even limited goals in Afghanistan after a series of crises
that have stirred resentment.
The official said the
unrest might complicate but was unlikely to significantly alter the overall
plan: to keep pulling out troops and focus instead on using Special Operations forces to train the
Afghans and go after insurgent and militant leaders in targeted raids while
diplomats try opening talks with the Taliban.
At the same time, the
administration plans to continue negotiations on a long-term framework to guide
relations with Afghanistan after the NATO mission through the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF) ends in 2014. Officials from the White House,
the State Department, the Pentagon and other agencies are to begin meeting this
week to hammer out details of the various efforts, and to work out the size of
the next round of withdrawals, which President Obama is expected to announce at
a NATO summit meeting planned for May in Chicago.
Those immediate talks,
officials say, could be most affected. What only weeks ago was an undercurrent
of anti-Americanism in Afghanistan is now a palpable fury, and if the situation
continues to deteriorate at its current pace, plans could be altered, the
official said. “There’s a certain impatience — I mean, there are people who
don’t see how we succeed under the current conditions, and their case is
getting stronger,” the official said.
Hundreds of American
military and civilian advisers have already been pulled out of the Afghan
ministries and government departments in Kabul, the capital. While that move
has been described as temporary, the official declined to speculate about what
kind of long-term changes could be envisioned. The official and others
interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity because of the
sensitivity of the crisis with Afghanistan.
Another administration
official said the unrest was “going to have a really negative effect” on all
the initiatives but added that much remained unclear and that the focus was on
damage control.
Regardless of the
challenges, and possible setbacks to vital negotiations, senior American
officials said on Sunday that the mission had to go on. “This is not the time
to decide that we’re done here,” the American ambassador in Kabul, Ryan C.
Crocker, said in an interview on CNN. “We have got to redouble our efforts.
We’ve got to create a situation in which Al Qaeda is not coming back.”
Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed regret for the burning of the Korans but said
it should not derail the American military and diplomatic effort in Afghanistan.
“We are condemning it in the strongest possible terms,” she said in Rabat,
Morocco, “but we also believe that the violence must stop, and the hard work of
trying to build a more peaceful, prosperous and secure Afghanistan must
continue.”
Another administration
official said, however, that there was recognition that the commitment was most
likely to carry a greater political cost. “There is no less a commitment to a
long-term relationship with Afghanistan,” the official said. “But is there a
concern now that many will question the need to stay? Yes — especially in an
election year.”
A leading Republican
candidate for president did appear to strike a more measured tone on Sunday in
speaking about the crisis in Afghanistan while urging that the United States
stay on its course.
Mitt Romney, speaking to
Fox News, said: “It’s obviously very dangerous there, and the transition effort
is not going as well as we’d like to see it go. But certainly the effort there
is an important one, and we want to see the Afghan security troops finally able
to secure their own country and bring our troops home when that job is done.”
He did, however,
reiterate his opposition to the administration’s setting a public timetable for
drawing down American forces in Afghanistan. And he and his main rival in the
Republican field, Rick Santorum, on Sunday continued their harsh criticism of
Mr. Obama’s apology for the Koran burnings.
On ABC News’s “This
Week,” Mr. Santorum said the president’s apology showed weakness. “There was
nothing deliberately done wrong here,” he said.
Even before this crisis,
the Obama administration was scaling back American ambitions in Afghanistan,
abandoning previous goals that focused on nation building, even if the result
was just “Afghan good enough” — a pejorative phrase often used as shorthand for
the low expectations many Westerners held for Afghanistan. Administration
officials have described a current aim of leaving behind a relatively
democratic government secure enough to keep Afghanistan from again becoming a
haven for Al Qaeda and other militants who threaten the West.
But their often unhappy
partner in that enterprise, President Hamid Karzai, has been the source of
growing impatience for American officials. The Afghan leader is in a tight
spot, needing to balance his domestic political considerations against his
long-troubled relations with his Western backers, upon whose support his
government survives.
Still, some officials
have been complimentary of his repeated call for calm during the current
crisis. In some past cases, Mr. Karzai was seen as trying to stoke his people’s
anger against the Americans.
“So far, they’re saying
the right things,” a senior defense official said. “Now it’s a matter of them
doing the right things.”
The official and others
said that in addition to policing the protests — which the Afghan security
forces have, for the most part, done well — the Afghan government needed to do
a better job of vetting its soldiers and police officers to help stem attacks
on alliance troops by Afghans.
“The Afghans have to do
their part as well,” the official said. “Our will to pursue the mission is
strong but could ebb if the Afghans don’t follow through quickly on their end
of the deal.”
One immediate fallout of
the violence was a decision on Sunday by two senior Afghan national security
officials — Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and Interior Minister Bismillah
Khan Mohammadi — to delay a joint visit to Washington that had been set for
this week.
George Little, the
Pentagon press secretary, said efforts were under way to reschedule the visit,
adding, “We believe that we can surmount recent challenges by working closely
with our Afghan and ISAF partners to redouble our shared commitment to the
sustained progress we’ve achieved together.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from
Washington, and Steven Lee Myers from Rabat, Morocco.
