Bloomberg Businessweek
Nicole Gaouette
12/13/2013
The U.S. expects to conclude a bilateral security agreement with Afghanistan and overcome Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s refusal so far to sign the pact, according to an Obama administration official.
“I don’t think there’s any serious doubt a bilateral security arrangement will eventually be concluded,” Ambassador James Dobbins, the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. “There’s no serious doubt that the Afghans want us to stay,” he said, citing the November approval of the security pact by the 2,500-member council of tribal elders called a loya jirga.
The Senate hearing highlighted U.S. frustration with the Afghan leader. Lawmakers criticized Karzai as irrational, questioned an agreement he made with Iran, and bristled at comments he made to a French newspaper comparing the U.S. to a colonial power because of its effort to push him to sign the security pact by year’s end.
According to estimates by the National Priorities Project, the cost of the Afghan war to U.S. taxpayers now exceeds $680 billion, and President Barack Obama’s administration has asked Congress to approve $3.4 billion in fiscal year 2014. To date, 2,155 Americans have been killed there since 2001, and another 19,475 have been wounded, according to Pentagon data compiled by Bloomberg.
If the security pact isn’t signed by the end of the year, the U.S. has said that it will have to start planning for a withdrawal of all 48,000 forces now in the country. American allies have another 27,000 troops in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. Defense Department.
Dobbins said that Russia, China, India, and Pakistan have urged Karzai to sign the agreement.
Karzai said he would approve the signing of an accord if it included an end to raids on Afghan homes and if the U.S. arranged formal peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Absent that, Karzai has said, the winner of next April’s presidential elections should sign the pact.
A U.S. agreement to stop raiding Afghan homes in search of militants “almost amounts to a one-sided cease-fire,” Dobbins said.
Irritation with Karzai -- in both the administration and Congress -- was evident during the hearing. “You can’t let one man be the bellwether for Afghanistan’s relationship with the United States,” said Dobbins.
Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, described Karzai as “president of a country that’s really not speaking for its citizens.”
“All of us who have had encounters” with the Afghan president “understand the irrationality that comes with most dealings with him,” Corker said.
A complete U.S. military pullout probably would cause other nations to withdraw their troops, Dobbins said. It would also end some aid to Afghanistan, threaten economic stability, and make it impossible to pay the country’s army and police.
Even a delay in signing is dangerous, Dobbins warned.
“There will be a cost to delaying, and the cost will be borne by the Afghan people,” Dobbins said. He pointed to the falling value of the Afghan currency, rising inflation, declining property values and capital flight, and attributed all of it to anxiety caused by Karzai’s delay.
“The longer this goes on, the worse the uncertainty will get,” Dobbins said.
In an interview that appeared today in the French newspaper Le Monde, Karzai lashed out at the U.S. for pressuring him to sign the accord. “The threats they are making, ‘We won’t pay salaries, we’ll drive you into a civil war.’ These are threats,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.
Lawmakers questioned Dobbins about an agreement that Karzai reached with Iran during a visit to the capital Tehran. The agreement covers politics, security, economic and cultural issues, Karzai’s office said, as well as Afghan development and the regional peace process.
Dobbins said Iran is Afghanistan’s only neighbor that doesn’t support Karzai signing a security pact. He downplayed the agreement, though.
“As we understand it, he simply agreed to negotiate an agreement,” Dobbins said. “At this point, I wouldn’t attach a lot of importance to it.”
