Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, making his first trip to Washington since taking office last fall, visits the White House on Tuesday to make the case for keeping more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but will likely face an American president unwilling to budge on his promise to wind down U.S. involvement in 2016.
Meeting with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Secretary of State John F. Kerry Monday, Mr. Ghani sounded a note of gratitude for American support in the long war with the Taliban, a sharp contrast from the often prickly relations U.S. officials had with his predecessor, Hamid Karzai.
Mr. Ghani, a former top World Bank official, thanked U.S. troops Monday and said they have built a legacy of a country that can defend itself against terrorism, one ready to tackle a massive nation-building job in the years to come.
“We do not now ask what the United States can do for us,” he said at the Pentagon Monday morning. “We want to say what Afghanistan will do for itself and for the world. And that means we are going to put our house in order.”
There are currently about 10,000 U.S. service members deployed to Afghanistan. Nora Bensahel, a scholar at American University, said she expected the president to agree to keep the deployment at its current level past December, when the U.S. force was supposed to shrink to 5,500 service members.
But Mr. Ghani has also expressed a need for foreign troops to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2016 — a line Mr. Obama likely won’t want to cross, Ms. Bensahel said.
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“I think that will be a very difficult political decision for him,” she said. “He made very clear throughout his presidency that he wants to be the president who ends both long wars during his term.”
Jeff Eggers, senior director for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the National Security Council, told reporters last week that Mr. Obama will make a statement on Afghanistan troop levels Tuesday after speaking with Mr. Ghani, but that “no decisions have been made yet.”
Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for New American Security, said the president has taken a risk by setting a deadline of the end of presidency to withdraw troops, rather than based on an assessment of conditions on the ground as Taliban attacks against Afghan forces have increase.
“At the end of the day, the president will have to decide whether to stick with the timeline and absorb the elevated level of risk and hand it off to the next president or not,” he said.
The deteriorating security situation in Iraq after the departure of U.S. may influence the drawdown in Afghanistan, Mr. Fontaine said.
The security situation in the Middle East may also force the president to rethink his deployment timetable. While violence in Tunisia and Yemen is not directly spilling into Afghanistan, Ms. Bensahel said the broader unrest in the Middle East could affect the administration’s plans.
“I think there’s concern about the path the region will take in the future and not wanting to add to that instability by withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan before security forces are really ready,” she said.
James Dobbins, Mr. Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014 and now with the RAND Corporation, said he expected Mr. Ghani to make the case that the Islamic State could expand from its Syrian base into Afghanistan and attract foreign fighters, becoming a “more extremist version of the Taliban.”
Mr. Carter said that while the U.S. and other international partners will continue to help in the fight, Mr. Ghani has made it clear that “Afghanistan’s future is ultimately for Afghans to grab hold of and for Afghans to decide.”
After meeting with Mr. Obama, Mr. Ghani will visit Capitol Hill on Wednesday before going to New York City on Thursday for meetings at the United Nations.
• Jacqueline Klimas can be reached at jklimas@washingtontimes.com.
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