Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets on Thursday with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, left, at the??President Barack Obama hosts President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Friday for talks likely to center on whether America will keep some sort of troop presence in that war-torn country after the NATO-crafted withdrawal deadline of 2014. No major announcement is expected about the fate of the 66,000 American troops there now.
Obama campaigned for re-election on a promise to end what is now America?s longest war. ?The war in Afghanistan is ending? he promised at one of his final rallies.
"We are leaving. We are leaving in 2014, period,? Vice President Joe Biden said in his debate with Republican rival Paul Ryan.
Except ? maybe not. The Obama administration has been negotiating with Karzai on a possible residual fighting force?a notion that?s always been part of the White House?s strategy, just not necessarily one that it has highlighted. When Obama traveled to Afghanistan in May 2012, a senior administration official told reporters that any fighting force left there after 2014 would focus on ?very specific, narrow missions? like counterterrorism and training Afghan troops.
Right now, both sides seem to be in a negotiating posture. Senior Obama national security aide Ben Rhodes got headlines this week by saying that Americans might leave entirely (White House press secretary Jay Carney said roughly the same thing in late November).
Karzai took a tough line on the issue in an early December interview with NBC News, saying he had written to Obama to say NATO-led forces would have to leave entirely unless the U.S. turns over hundreds of detainees held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and a nearby facility. (American officials say the logistics of that are being worked out.)
Obama aides have long trumpeted the pullout from Iraq as a major foreign policy victory. But that came about in part because of the collapse of negotiations over maintaining an American presence there. The Iraqi government refused to give U.S. forces immunity from prosecution?a deal breaker for Washington. In the NBC interview, Karzai raised the specter of another possible deal breaker.
Would Afghanistan consider giving American forces immunity?
"We can consider that question. I can go to the Afghan people and argue for it," said Karzai. "But before I do that, the United States of America must make absolutely sure that they respect Afghanistan's sovereignty, that they respect Afghanistan's laws, that no Afghan is hurt or his or her rights violated by U.S. soldiers."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-meets-karzai-u-troops-2014-150844683--politics.html
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