Obama makes surprise trip to Afghanistan to sign key pact, mark bin Laden raid

[Do Do]

By Kevin Sieff and Scott Wilson [Washington Post]:

View Photo Gallery — Obama’s surprise visit to Afghanistan: The president arrived on the one-year anniversary of the attack that killed Osama bin Laden and during a pivotal moment in U.S-Afghan relations as the countries look to define their relationship after U.S. troops officially withdraw in 2014.

KABUL — President Obama outlined his plan to end America’s longest foreign war during a visit here Tuesday colored by election-year politics and economic uncertainty, declaring that “this time of war began in Afghanistan, and this is where it will end.”

“We have traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war,” the president said at a U.S. military base. “In the pre-dawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of a new day on the horizon.”

Obama delivered his address at the end of an unannounced visit here to sign a long-term partnership agreement with the Afghan government and to mark, alongside American troops at Bagram air base outside this capital city, the first anniversary of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The trip came amid criticism at home that Obama is using the raid to advance his reelection prospects by featuring his decision to launch the mission in campaign videos and other political settings. As Republican critics have called his leadership abroad weak, Obama has held up the bin Laden operation as evidence that he is willing to make risky decisions to protect U.S. interests.

His arrival here was timed to make the “strategic partnership agreement” official before an important NATO summit this month — and, in the words of one senior administration official traveling with Obama, to take advantage of “a resonant day for both our countries on the anniversary of the death of bin Laden.”

Obama used his time with the troops to emphasize the sacrifices they and their families have made over more than a decade of conflict, saying that in doing so they made the bin Laden mission successful and put the long war on a path to its conclusion.

The hours-long visit was directed almost entirely toward an American audience, unfolding while most Afghans slept. It also served as a detente after some of the tensest months in U.S.-Afghan relations.

Since February, American service members have inadvertently burned Korans at a U.S. military base, Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly murdered 17 civilians in Kandahar province, and at least 18 NATO troops have been killed by their Afghan counterparts. In addition to straining ties and infuriating Afghans, the incidents have contributed to rising war fatigue at home.

Opinion polls show most Americans no longer believe the war is worth fighting. But the strategic agreement and the troop withdrawal schedule allow Obama to say that he has ended the war in Iraq and is winding down the one in Afghanistan, a position even a majority of Republicans favor.

“The Iraq war is over. The number of our troops in harm’s way has been cut in half, and more will be coming home soon,” Obama said Tuesday. “We have a clear path to fulfill our mission in Afghanistan while delivering justice to al-Qaeda.”

Obama campaigned in 2008 on a pledge to end the Iraq war, something he did in December, and to strengthen the U.S. effort in Afghanistan at a time when the Taliban appeared resurgent and al-Qaeda was active in the regions along the Pakistani border.

With opposition to the Afghanistan war building within his party, Obama announced the beginning of the end of the U.S. mission last year by adopting a withdrawal timeline more rapid than some of his commanders recommended.

The decision drew criticism from some of his GOP rivals, including the presumptive presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, that Obama was calibrating his war strategy to the election calendar. Romney, who on Tuesday gave Obama a share of the credit for bin Laden’s killing, has said the U.S. goal should be to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield.

But Obama on Tuesday laid out a different ambition.

“Our goal is not to build a country in America’s image or to eradicate every vestige of the Taliban,” he said. “These objectives would require many more years, many more dollars and many more American lives. Our goal is to destroy al-Qaeda, and we are on a path to do exactly that.”

The last of the 33,000 troops Obama dispatched to Afghanistan in 2009 will head home at the end of September. Senior administration officials said Tuesday that, though no specific future troop levels have been determined, a “steady reduction” will follow over the next two years.

Obama’s timeline calls on Afghan security forces to take the lead in combat operations by the end of next year. All U.S. troops are scheduled to leave by the end of 2014, except for trainers who will assist Afghan forces and a small contingent of troops with a specific mission to combat al-Qaeda through counterterrorism operations.

In his remarks, Obama emphasized that the United States will not seek permanent military bases in Afghanistan, a country that for centuries has fiercely opposed foreign interlopers.

Those U.S. trainers and Special Operations troops that remain beyond 2014 will live on Afghan bases. Senior administration officials said the agreement is meant to send a signal to the Taliban that they cannot “wait out” the international presence, which is supporting a fragile Afghan government.

“The goal I set to defeat al-Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild is now within reach,” Obama said.

Traveling overnight and landing in darkness, Obama arrived at Bagram air base, 35 miles north of Kabul, at 10:20 p.m. local time and boarded a helicopter for a flight into the capital. He arrived at the presidential palace just after 11 p.m. for a meeting with President Hamid Karzai, who has had a contentious relationship with Obama over the years.

“I’m here to affirm the bond between our two countries and to thank Americans and Afghans who have sacrificed so much over these last 10 years,” Obama said. “Neither Americans nor the Afghan people asked for this war, yet for a decade we’ve stood together.”

In signing the agreement after 20 months of difficult negotiations, Obama said that “the Afghan people and the world should know that Afghanistan has a partner in the United States.”

Karzai has long requested reassurance from Obama that U.S. support would not wane after 2014. The agreement commits Obama to ask Congress for money to support Afghanistan through 2024, but it does not specify the amount of annual aid.

The accord is designed to promote the training of Afghan forces, a reconciliation and reintegration process for Taliban fighters who leave the battlefield, and regional stability with a focus on improving relations with Pakistan. A second senior administration official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, called it “a crucial component to bring the war to an end responsibly.”

In speaking with troops after the signing ceremony, Obama sounded notes of praise and hope.

“I know the battle is not yet over; some of your buddies are going to get injured, some of your buddies may get killed. And there’s going to be heartbreak and pain ahead,” he said. “But there is a light on the horizon because of the sacrifices you made.”

Karzai has had a tempestuous relationship with American leaders in recent years, making demands that U.S. officials have seen as unrealistic and maligning Washington as trying to strong-arm reconciliation efforts with the Taliban.

At the heart of Karzai’s discontent were two issues that appeared to have the potential to obstruct a long-term partnership: night operations and a U.S. military prison at Bagram.

This year, at Karzai’s behest, the United States agreed to cede control of the night raids and the detention center to Afghan security forces — concessions that paved the way for the long-term partnership agreement.

But beyond the substantive reforms that Karzai has demanded, Afghan officials say their president has also longed for more access to Washington — a wish that Obama’s rare visit to Kabul may have sought to satisfy.

Administration officials said Obama wanted to sign the deal in Kabul to highlight Afghan sovereignty and the changing nature of the U.S.-Afghan relationship.

“Today, with the signing of the strategic partnership agreement, we look forward to a future of peace,” he said after signing the pact.

Americans have not outlined what the U.S. troop presence will look like beyond 2014, and NATO has yet to specify its long-term financial commitment to the Afghan security forces. That topic will be a focal point of the NATO summit in Chicago this month.

U.S. military officials say they have been impressed with the improvement of the Afghan forces — an assessment echoed Tuesday by administration officials traveling with Obama.

But the Taliban remains strong in the south and the east, penetrating key security barriers in Kabul and Kandahar — the country’s most important cities — within the past month. In a coordinated assault on April 15, more than 35 militants staged simultaneous attacks on high-profile targets in several cities across eastern Afghanistan, including the capital.

“Let us finish the work at hand,” Obama said Tuesday, “and forge a just and lasting peace.”

Wilson reported from Washington. Staff writers Karen DeYoung and Ed O’Keefe in Washington contributed to this report.

[Do Do]

By Ernesto Londoño:

After signing a 10-year lease and spending more than $80 million on a site envisioned as the United States’ diplomatic hub in northern Afghanistan, American officials say they have abandoned their plans, deeming the location for the proposed compound too dangerous.

Eager to raise an American flag and open a consulate in a bustling downtown district of the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, officials in 2009 sought waivers to stringent State Department building rules and overlooked significant security problems at the site, documents show. The problems included relying on local building techniques that made the compound vulnerable to a car bombing, according to an assessment by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that was obtained by The Washington Post.

The decision to give up on the site is the clearest sign to date that, as the U.S.-led military coalition starts to draw down troops amid mounting security concerns, American diplomats are being forced to reassess how to safely keep a viable presence in Afghanistan. The plan for the Mazar-e Sharif consulate, as laid out in a previously undisclosed diplomatic memorandum, is a cautionary tale of wishful thinking, poor planning and the type of stark choices the U.S. government will have to make in coming years as it tries to wind down its role in the war.

In March 2009, Richard C. Holbrooke, who had recently been appointed President Obama’s envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, lobbied for the establishment of a consulate in Mazar-e Sharif within 60 days, according to the memo. The city was deemed relatively safe at the time, far removed from Taliban strongholds of the south. A consulate just a short walk from Mazar-e Sharif’s Blue Mosque, one of the country’s most sacred religious sites, was seen as a way to reassure members of the ethnic Tajik and Uzbek minorities that dominate the north that the United States was committed to Afghanistan for the long haul.

“At the time, [Holbrooke] pushed hard to identify property and stand up an interim consulate, on a very tight timeline, to signal our commitment to the Afghan people,” according to the January memo by Martin Kelly, the acting management counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Holbrooke died in 2010 of complications from heart surgery.

An embassy spokesman declined to respond to questions about the assessment of the Mazar-e Sharif compound, saying that as a policy matter officials do not discuss leaked documents.

Trouble from the start

Had the Mazar-e Sharif consulate opened this year as planned, it would have been the second of four the U.S. government intends to set up. The United States has a consulate in the western Afghan city of Herat and is assessing options for the three other cities where it intends to keep a permanent diplomatic presence: Kandahar in the south, Jalalabad in the east and Mazar-e Sharif.

The embassy memo says the facility was far from ideal from the start. The compound, which housed a hotel when the Americans took it on, shared a wall with local shopkeepers. The space between the outer perimeter wall and buildings inside — a distance known as “setback” in war zone construction — was not up to U.S. diplomatic standards set by the State Department’s Overseas Security Policy Board. The complex was surrounded by several tall buildings from which an attack could easily be launched.

“The Department nonetheless granted exceptions to standards to move forward quickly, establish an interim presence and raise the flag,” Kelly wrote.

Among the corners cut in the interest of expediency, the memo says, was failing to assess how well the facility could withstand a car bombing, a task normally carried out by the department’s Bureau of Overseas Building Operations. After Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker arrived in Kabul in July, officials asked the bureau to conduct a blast assessment.

“We believe the survey will show that a [car bomb] would cause catastrophic failure of the building in light of the local construction techniques and materials,” Kelly wrote.

The structure’s outer perimeter wall is composed of sun-dried bricks made from mud, straw and manure, and the contractor used untreated timber for the roof, the memo says.

A chain of security incidents has prevented U.S. officials from moving into the facility, which was scheduled to be ready for occupancy last month. Most notable was the April 2011 attack on the United Nations compound, which is close to the would-be U.S. consulate. A mob enraged by the burning of Korans by a fringe American pastor stormed into the compound after Friday prayers and killed three European U.N. workers and four of their Nepalese guards.

Susceptible to attack

There were other reasons for concern. In August, according to the memo, Afghan security forces uncovered a “sophisticated surveillance operation against the consulate, including information about plans to breach the consulate site.” In December, four people were killed in a bombing at the Blue Mosque, less than an eighth of a mile from the prospective consulate.

The attacks and threats, Kelly wrote, “are symptomatic of a real, measurable uptick in the threat stream.” The hours-long attack in September on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from a nearby building under construction renewed concerns about the vulnerabilities of the Mazar-e Sharif site.

“The entire compound is surrounded by buildings with overwatch and there is almost no space on the compound that cannot be watched, or fired upon, from an elevated position outside the compound,” Kelly wrote.

Responding effectively to an emergency at the consulate would be next to impossible, Kelly noted, because the facility does not have space for a Black Hawk helicopter to land. It would take a military emergency response team 11 / 2 to 2 hours to reach the site “under good conditions,” he said.

In December, embassy officials began exploring alternative short-term sites for their diplomatic staff in northern Afghanistan. A Western diplomat familiar with the situation said the United States has sought, so far in vain, to persuade the German and Swedish governments to sublet it. The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, said European diplomats have found the prospect laughable.