Obama (left) held what he called 'blunt' talks with Karzai on Saturday. No road map for Afghan withdrawal

LISBON, Portugal — President Barack Obama and nearly 50 world leaders attending the NATO summit that concluded here Saturday adopted a call to give the Afghan government control over its own security by 2014.

Not so much talked about, in public anyway, were some of the toughest decisions that may be required to get there.


With the public in the U.S and particularly in Europe losing patience with the Afghan mission, the NATO announcement seemed intended to generate headlines or at least a public perception of a plan for withdrawal.

In fact, the transition plan is more of a hope than a detailed road map. The provinces to be handed over next year by NATO and U.S. forces have yet to be selected, officials said, and the prospects for transition in parts of the country facing the fiercest fighting are murky at best. Decisions about whether to negotiate with the Taliban have yet to be made and disagreements remain about what concessions could be made.

Some experts said the NATO meeting’s focus on a transition by 2014 effectively put the cart before the horse, setting a relatively distant goal for a handover while urgent issues about the current strategy remain unresolved.

“What concerns me is a dangerous mix of false optimism and a basic misunderstanding of the problem in Afghanistan, as well as a bias toward process solutions to political problems,” said Joshua Rovner, a professor at the Naval War College. “The reason it's so popular is that it lets us skip to points C and D ... without resolving A and B.”

“It also requires the belief that Afghanistan can quickly make the heroic leap from war and anarchy to stable and democratic governance. History suggests that this is wishful thinking,” Rovner said.

Obama acknowledged that the goal of handing more power to the Afghans left a lot of thorny details up in the air. “In that transition, there are also going to be a whole series of judgment calls and adjustments that are necessary to make that effective,” he said at a press conference wrapping up two days of NATO meetings.

Analysts said the transition plan could also be viewed as a political consensus that the presence of significant coalition forces in Afghanistan past 2014 is unsustainable, particularly if significant combat continues.

Almost a year ago in a speech outlining his policy on Afghanistan at West Point, Obama said he would deploy more troops there but promised he would begin withdrawing them by next July, “taking into account conditions on the ground.”

But with the full transition to Afghan forces outlined in Lisbon not due for another three years after U.S. troops begin coming home, the U.S. is hardly disengaging from Afghanistan as quickly and completely as many Democrats have urged Obama to do.

“My goal is to make sure that, by 2014, we have transitioned, Afghans are in the lead, and it is a goal to make sure that we are not still engaged in combat operations of the sort that we're involved with now," Obama said. "Certainly, our footprint will have been significantly reduced. But beyond that, you know, it's hard to anticipate exactly what is going to be necessary.”

Still, U.S. officials had initially declined to embrace a comment from NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen saying that coalition troops planned to phase out their combat mission by 2014.

A senior administration official conceded that, despite all the talk about 2014, it’s very difficult to say where the country will stand then in terms of security forces, governance and corruption.

“Many of those variables are not yet knowable — they’re not known and they’re not perhaps knowable with regard to Afghanistan. So, that’s why the president has not yet made this decision about when he’s going to change the U.S. mission,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“It’s also why, as you look into the crystal ball, you just can’t discern what force levels might be — or even what the mission might be by the end of 2014. It’s just too deep,” he added.

Obama said he thinks that Gen. David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban was paying off, though he conceded that progress — set to be assessed in a U.S. review next month — has been uneven.

“You have fewer areas of Afghanistan under Taliban control,” he said. “You have the Taliban on the defensive in a number of areas that were their strongholds. We have met or exceeded our targets in terms of recruitment of Afghan security forces. And our assessments are that the performance of Afghan security forces has improved significantly.”

In all, he added, “we are in a better place now than we were a year ago.”

Yet, in some parts of the country withdrawing foreign troops seems to be an ambitious goal — if security is to be maintained. For the first time in the near-decade-long war effort, the U.S. military is planning to send tanks into some areas in Afghanistan where coalition troops have faced ambushes, The Washington Post reported this week.

“There is a lot of talk about transitions or withdrawals, which mainly are being raised for domestic political reasons but no clear sense of what the endgame is for U.S./NATO policy or even a recognizable political strategy that is being executed on,” said Michael Cohen, a former State Department official now with the American Security Project.

“I, for example, don't know anyone outside the military who believes that [Afghan forces] will be ready to take over security by 2014 or who expects to see much improvement in the performance of the Afghan government and, yet, this is being presented as some sort of drop-dead date for progress to be achieved.”

While officials here did not go quite that far, Vice President Joe Biden, who famously argued against sending more troops to Afghanistan, was more emphatic that 2014 is a firm deadline.

“That's kind of the drop-dead date,” Biden told MSNBC on Friday.

One goal of the summit was clearly to dispel an appearance of some disarray on the part of the Afghan coalition. Again and again, the catchphrase for U.S. and NATO officials was that they were “aligning” their policies, or, as Obama put it, “completely aligned.”

However, countries were far from aligned on core issues such as their continued willingness to commit combat troops to achieving that goal.

Dutch troops have already withdrawn, and Canada’s government has said it is determined to remove its combat force next year. In a concession to the U.S. and other NATO allies, Canada agreed to send 750 military trainers and 200 support staff to Afghanistan in support of the transition effort.

U.S. officials downplayed those disagreements, touting the Canadian decision as a net plus for the transition and emphasizing that different countries had different capabilities to offer.

One key variable in any transition will be the viability and efficacy of the Afghan government that would assume control as NATO steps back.

On Saturday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai attended the meeting of NATO countries and other coalition members, signing a declaration agreeing in broad strokes to the NATO plan. Later, Obama held what he called “blunt” talks with Karzai following recent comments he made calling for NATO forces to reduce their numbers and the impact of their operations, particularly when it comes to so-called night raids aimed at rounding up or killing insurgents.

Obama said Karzai’s worries about civilian casualties were “perfectly appropriate.”

“On the other hand, he’s got to understand that I've got a bunch of young men and women from small towns and big cities all across America who are in a foreign country being shot at and having to traverse terrain filled with IEDs, and they need to protect themselves. And so if we're setting things up where they’re just sitting ducks for the Taliban, that's not an acceptable answer either.”

Still, to Cohen and other critics, the plan described here to turn the combat mission over to Karzai’s government had echoes of a similar, unsuccessful U.S. effort in Vietnam that came to be known as Vietnamization.

Cohen insisted that NATO’s goals for the military campaign and its expectations for the capacity of the Afghan central government remained too ambitious.

“It's eerily reminiscent of Vietnam when U.S. policymakers kept suggesting that military pressure would cause the North Vietnamese to come to the table and talk, but when they didn't, the only strategy in the U.S. arsenal was to keep ratcheting up pressure ... until ultimately, we were the ones who blinked,” he said.