Afghanistan Latest: US and NATO Move Towards Perpetual Commitment

Success/withdrawal is dead. Long live the new date for success/non-withdrawal.

The amnesia in most of the reporting on this week's NATO summit on Afghanistan is quite remarkable. No one mentions that, only weeks ago, President Obama's policy was for a total pull-out of US combat forces by July 2011. Instead the assumption --- pushed by the US military --- was now established: troops would remain until 2014.

And now, even more remarkably, the media is pulled along with yet another narrative: "NATO and American officials also warned that if Afghanistan had not made sufficient progress in managing its own security, 2014 was not a hard and fast deadline for the end of combat operations."

It will be a perpetual transition.

We'll have a full analysis this week. Meanwhile, Steven Erlanger and Jackie Calmes report for The New York Times:

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 NATO officials acknowledged that allied forces would remain in Afghanistan, at least in a support role, well beyond that date.

NATO and American officials also warned that if Afghanistan had not made sufficient progress in managing its own security, 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 on Saturday after signing a long-term security agreement with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.

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 Mr. Rasmussen and other officials on Saturday were the most definitive to date.

Despite the show of unity at the summit meeting here, there were also signs of sharp disagreements behind the scenes. Asked about Mr. Karzai’s demands that the NATO-led coalition stop carrying out night raids and limit airstrikes, which military commanders consider among their most effective tools but which have caused civilian casualties, President Obama was blunt.

“If we’re ponying up billions of dollars,” Mr. Obama said, “to ensure that President Karzai can continue to build and develop his country, then he’s got to also pay attention to our concerns as well.”

While calling civilian deaths “an entirely legitimate issue on the part of President Karzai,” Mr. Obama said “he’s got to understand that I’ve got a bunch of young men and women” who are “in a foreign country being shot at” and “need to protect themselves.”

At a closed-door meeting here, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, set out his strategy for the transition, confirming that the kind of operations Mr. Karzai has criticized, including drone missile strikes and nighttime raids, would continue aggressively.

In a separate NATO-Russia summit meeting here that both sides called historic, President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia agreed to explore cooperation with the alliance on a missile-defense system that would protect all of Europe.

After the summit meeting, Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Obama had a “very cordial” unscheduled 20-minute meeting without aides that Mr. Obama initiated, according to two administration officials who spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One on the return to Washington on Saturday night.

The two leaders discussed several issues, including the New Start arms control agreement that Republicans in the Senate are blocking.

But the main work of the day was Afghanistan.

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