Dempsey Photo-Op With Karzai Illustrates Futility of SOFA Negotiations

Dempsey and Karzai pose for the cameras while their countries come no closer to an agreement keeping US troops in Afghanistan. (Defense Department photo)

Dempsey and Karzai pose for the cameras while their countries come no closer to an agreement keeping US troops in Afghanistan. (Defense Department photo)

As the Afghanistan disaster careens closer to the late 2014 end of the NATO mission, the US continues to embarrass itself while it perpetuates the charade of trying to negotiate terms for US forces to remain in Afghanistan beyond 2014. On Monday, the US flew Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey to Kabul where he had a photo opportunity with Hamid Karzai. Even while the “meetings” were taking place, unfolding events in Afghanistan demonstrate that US plans to keep thousands of troops in Afghanistan under an agreement that has not yet been negotiated show the same lack of situational awareness that has characterized the entire failed military effort there.

As I have been harping for months, a single issue controls the entire concept of whether the US will have troops in Afghanistan after 2014. Just as we saw in Iraq, the US simply will not leave troops in the country if there is no agreement granting criminal immunity to the troops. However, the articles in today’s New York Times and Washington Post on Dempsey’s visit make no reference to the role that immunity will play in whether an agreement is signed. It appears that one has to be retired from the Obama administration to be able to confirm the importance (and unlikelihood of its being granted) of the immunity issue. After blathering that he was making no plans under the zero option (of no US troops in Afghanistan post-2014), Dempsey said that he wants to know where things stand by October of this year and even allowed that there could be a “zero outcome”. That suggests to me that the military at least realizes the very late arrival at a zero outcome in Iraq was so disastrous that a year’s preparation for it will somehow make things better this time.

At the same time that Dempsey and Karzai were smiling for the cameras, the Afghan parliament was voting to remove the interior minister, Mujtaba Patang, from office over the high death rate of Afghan police. Patang announced that over the last four months, 2748 Afghan policemen have died. [I haven’t seen any numbers for how many Afghan military lives have been lost during this time, but that number is also likely to be very high.]

An article today by ToloNews regarding Patang’s ouster (although Karzai is referring the move to the Supreme Court to buy more time), however, provides a rare glimpse of how Afghan experts view the status of US efforts to train and arm Afghan defense forces:

Experts feel that due to lack of proper training and shortage of equipments the Security Forces are not able to fight the insurgents in an effective manner, leading to an increased casualty figures.

Several MPs also expressed their concerns over the increasing casualties within the Afghan police forces.

“Afghanistan’s government should work on a plan to reduce police force causalities. Several lives are lost due to lack of proper training and equipment,” said MP Sediq Ahmad Osmani.

Apart from the forces’ casualties, several residents had a different story to tell. They accused the Security Forces and Police of maltreatment and corruption. The residents said that the Security Forces and Police are equally responsible for the current situation in Afghanistan.

Over the past 11 years, one of the aims of the international community was to build a powerful and self-sufficient military force in Afghanistan. There are over 350,000 Afghan security personnel who will take charge of complete security responsibilities from the foreign troops by the end of 2014.

As other explanations of why the US must remain in Afghanistan have faded away, the mission to train and equip Afghan forces to take on responsibility for their own security has stood as the only remaining justification for several years. Despite all those years and all those billions of dollars squandered, the security situation is getting worse and not better. And the reason security is deteriorating is because despite all that training and equipping we claim to have done, Afghan forces remain too poorly trained and too poorly equipped to take on the job we have been preparing them to assume. Does the US really believe that with “just one more year” the deficiencies in training and equipping can be overcome?

The time to hit the zero option is now. There is no need to wait another year while the situation only gets worse.

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8 replies
  1. Garrett says:

    What do you call a warlord in Afghanistan?

    General Dempsey made the remarks in Kabul, where he met with President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan leaders

    NYT

    “Other Afghan leader”.

  2. Garrett says:

    The AAN profile of Patang says he is a Fahim guy, with excellent foreign contacts, and a fast riser. He comes across as a reasonably decent technocrat.

    Any minister could be impeached for good cause at any time. But the newspapers just aren’t going to tell us what the political maneuverings are. It’s like an impeachment effort in the U.S., where the newspapers didn’t talk about Republicans and Democrats.

    Zalmay Khalilzad has been brokering an election slate. Fahim got all pissy: foreign interference in internal Afghan affairs. Khalilzad then said, Fahim doesn’t understand what our plans are. A slate got announced: Sayyaf, Fahim, and Mohaqiq.

    So, now, Patang is under the gun from some direction. He’s threatening to name names about land theft, which might mean Sayyaf.

    But in the Tolo, Osmani is quoted. Osmani is from Parwan, and gets descibed as a Fahim/Karzai guy. His brother is Counternarcotics Minister, and a Fahim guy. Which is very convenient in a country where the First Vice President is one of the bigger narcotics trafficers.

    What a damn mess.

    And Sayyaf as a potential president. What a damn nightmare.

  3. Arbusto says:

    How odd that USofA trained and armed (however limited) forces seem so ineffective and incompetent against disparate insurgent groups whose training, if not equipment, would seem likely less than the government forces.

  4. Greg Bean (@GregLBean) says:

    ” the mission to train and equip Afghan forces to take on responsibility for their own security has stood as the only remaining justification for several years”

    THEIR OWN SECURITY as defined by …. the US. Interesting concept, perhaps we can also train them to speak English, become Christians (or Jews), eat pulled pork buns, and all the other good things they just have to accept as FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.

    What a farce, yup Jim, I agree, get the troops out yesterday!

  5. Michael Murry says:

    The French had another name for the “Vietnamization” program in which I served as an erstwhile “trainer” four decades ago. They called it “Yellowing the corpses.” I submit that the “Afghanization” (like “Iraqification” before it) deserves the name “Browning the Bodies.” It amounts to the same cynical and discredited supposition that foreigners will fight and kill their own countrymen for U.S. corporate and military career interests so that Americans can have the killing without having to do it themselves or take any casualties at the hands of local foreign patriots who would rather kill foreign American invaders than their own kind.

    Sheer insanity. Any American official advocating such a lunatic policy deserves summary public firing for idiocy and incompetence beyond even the normal call of duty for an American.

  6. joanneleon says:

    Jesus!

    “At the same time that Dempsey and Karzai were smiling for the cameras, the Afghan parliament was voting to remove the interior minister, Mujtaba Patang, from office over the high death rate of Afghan police. Patang announced that over the last four months, 2748 Afghan policemen have died. [I haven’t seen any numbers for how many Afghan military lives have been lost during this time, but that number is also likely to be very high.]”

    Any idea what the number would be for Afghan military? In FOUR months? God, I still can’t believe that. That’s about 23 Afghan police killed every day.

  7. joanneleon says:

    @Garrett: How much involvement in the narcotics running operations do our troops and mercenaries have? If it’s significant, what happens if we pull everybody out?

  8. Garrett says:

    @joanneleon:

    I haven’t ever seen any significant story about direct U.S. involvement in drug trafficking.

    The U.S. propping up and supporting Afghan power players heavily involved in drug trafficking, though, is just everywhere.

    Patang’s ministry, Interior, has always been a major center of political intrigue about drugs.

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