NATO: Afghans get security reins in ’14

LISBON, Portugal — NATO and Afghanistan agreed Saturday to the goal of a phased transfer of security responsibility to the Afghan government by the end of 2014, but acknowledged that allied forces would remain in Afghanistan in a support role well beyond that date.

And if Afghanistan has not made sufficient progress in managing its own security, NATO officials warned, 2014 was not a hard-and-fast deadline for the end of combat operations.

“We will stay after transition in a supporting role,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary-general of NATO, said at a news conference Saturday after meeting with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. “President Karzai and I signed an agreement on a long-term partnership between NATO and Afghanistan that will endure beyond our combat mission.”

NATO officials had previously said it was likely that tens of thousands of support troops would remain in Afghanistan past 2014 to provide training and other security guarantees to Kabul. But the statements by Rasmussen and other officials on Saturday were more definite.

Rasmussen said that the aim of the agreement signed Saturday was to hand security responsibility to Afghan forces by the end of 2014, and for foreign troops serving in the coalition, known as the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, to cease com-bat by then. But that deadline was also hedged, as officials have previously noted.

“Here in Lisbon, we have launched the process by which the Afghan people will once again become masters in their own house,” Rasmussen said.

“I don’t foresee ISAF troops in a combat role beyond 2014, provided of course that the security situation allows us to move into a more supportive role,” he said.

Officials have said that NATO’s withdrawal was contingent on the ability of Afghan forces to take on their new responsibilities.

“2014 is a goal, not a guarantee,” Mark Sedwill, NATO’s top civilian representative in Kabul, said Saturday. “But we think that goal’s realistic and we’ve made plans to achieve it, but of course if circumstances agree it could be sooner.”

He said last week that poor security in some areas could delay the pullout date, and that Afghanistan could face “eye-watering levels of violence by Western standards.”

A senior U.S. official said that Washington would not commit to any deadline now for the end of combat operations, given the need to gauge progress on the ground as the training of the Afghan forces proceeded.

The official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said that 1,500 trainers were already in place. He said that all 34 Afghan provinces had been graded into different categories of security and stability. But decisions on which provinces will first be handed over to Afghan control have not yet been made, the official said.

But, he cautioned, “No one should read out of Lisbon that the fighting is over.”

“There is a lot of hard fighting that lies ahead,” he said.

Despite the strain between Karzai and NATO lately, the Afghan president was described as genial and cooperative during the private meeting with NATO leaders on Saturday, standing in his long, green, striped cloak to greet President Barack Obama, with whom he was to have a separate meeting later in the day.

Obama acknowledged that “we might not always see eye to eye,” but said the partnership was important, said a Western diplomat in the room. Obama also thanked NATO and other allies - 48 countries were represented in the meeting - for their contributions to Afghanistan. “There were no histrionics,” another Western diplomat said.

At the same time, Karzai is pushing for greater Afghan control.

“As I stand before you today, we are moving in the direction of Afghan leadership, Afghan ownership,” he said.

2014 GOAL

Obama on Saturday echoed NATO’s goals, saying for the first time that he wants U.S. troops out of major combat in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

“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 we’re involved in now,” said Obama at a closing news conference.

For some U.S. allies, 2014 is more than a goal when it comes to shifting their troops from a combat role.

“There will not be British troops in large numbers and they won’t be in a combat role” by 2015, British Prime Minister David Cameron said. But, he added, Britain has no intention of abandoning Afghanistan any time soon.

“We may be helping to train their army, we may still be delivering a lot of aid, in effect, because we don’t want this country to go back to being a lawless space where the terrorists can have bases,” Cameron told Sky News television.

Canada is ending its combat role in 2011.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Saturday in Chile that only a “fraction” of the current allied forces in Afghanistan are likely to remain past 2014. They probably will function as trainers and advisers instead of fighting, he said.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, also made a private presentation setting out his military strategy for the transition, which will include more aggressive military operations of the kind that Karzai has sometimes criticized, including more drone-missile strikes and nighttime raids.

MISSILE DEFENSE

Later on Saturday, NATO leaders began a summit meeting with the Russian president, President Dmitry Medvedev. After having agreed Friday on a missile-defense system that will gradually protect all of NATO’s members, the alliance is eager to secure an agreement from Russia to cooperate in missile defense, by sharing information from each other’s systems. Moscow has already said that it is interested in cooperation, but has many questions about how such a system would work.

On Friday night, Obama called on the Senate to follow NATO’s lead and move toward immediate approval of the new nuclear arms-reduction treaty with Russia. He said leaders from across Europe had told him they support the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in statements that “could not be clearer.”

“Nobody is more aware of the need for a strong, secure and democratic Europe than our Eastern and Central European allies,” Obama said of the newest NATO members, whose concerns have been cited by Republican opponents of the treaty.

“Just as this is a national security priority for the United States,” he said, the treaty will “strengthen our alliance,and it will strengthen European security.”

AFGHAN DEATHS

Meanwhile, coalition forces accidentally killed three Afghan civilians and wounded four others when mortar shells it fired missed insurgents and landed near a village, NATO said Saturday.

NATO said in a statement that the deaths occurred Friday when coalition troops came under fire in Pech district of Kunar province.

“When coalition forces returned fire, three or four rounds landed short of the target area, near a village, killing and wounding the civilians,” the statement said.

“We take civilian casualties seriously and we do everything within our power to prevent civilian casualties in the course of operations. In this case, we failed,” said U.S. Army Col. Rafael Torres, director of the NATO operations center in Kabul. “Our thoughts and concerns are with the families of this tragic accident.”

Also in the east, two remote-controlled bombs attached to bicycles exploded about 30 minutes apart Saturday just east of Kabul, killing four people and wounding more than 30, local officials said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the explosions, saying they were targeting police and Afghan intelligence workers.

Separately, the Afghan government reported that a senior Taliban commander was killed in an airstrike Saturday in Nad Ali district of Helmand province in the south. The commander was known to have planned bombings and suicide attacks in the area, according to a government statement.

Information for this article was contributed by Steven Erlanger, Jackie Calmes and Judy Dempsey of The New York Times; by Robert Burns, Julie Pace, Alan Clendenning, Slobodan Lekic, Anne Gearan and Rahim Faiez of The Associated Press; and by The Washington Post.