Secretary of State John Kerry stopped in Kabul today for talks with Afghan president Hamid Karzai in an attempt to push along the stalled security negotiations between the two countries, which hinge around allowing American troops to stay past their December 2014 withdrawal deadline.
A senior State Department official told reporters on Friday that a deal “is both preferable and doable” but “the ball remains, of course, in the Afghans’ court, but that’s the reason why we’re going on this trip.”
Adding to the pressure is the fact that Afghanistan is scheduled to hold a presidential election next spring, and president Karzai is legally barred from running again.
While any deal will have to get done well before the election, “as the Afghan political establishment shifts into election mode, it’s going to be more difficult for them to focus on getting to a resolution of these issues,” the official said, “so we’d like to bring them to a close before we get to that point.”
The officials stressed that Secretary Kerry doesn’t expect to wrap up the negotiations during his visit, but flew to Kabul after an Oct. 5 phone conversation with Karzai. He hopes to inject new urgency into the talks that hit their deadline in 20 days.
The main sticking points to getting the deal done revolve around Afghan concerns over what kind of counterterrorism force the U.S. wants to leave behind, and Kabul’s concerns over Americans killing Afghan citizens.
President Obama has said that he is open to leaving an unspecified number of troops and special operations forces behind after 2014, which officials in the Pentagon have put at about 10,000.
The State Department official said that “we have articulated clearly two missions post-2014 that we have decided are in the United States national interest, and those are: training and assisting the Afghan army, and the counterterrorism mission against al-Qaida.” The BSA must address those issues, the official said.
