海角大神

After months of delay, due mostly to intransigence by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai,聽the United States and Afghanistan have entered into an agreement that will keep American troops in Afghanistan past 2014, largely in a training role:

It was essentially a foregone conclusion that the agreement would eventually be signed since, despite Karzai鈥檚 intransigence, both of the main candidates to succeed Mr. Karzai supported the agreement, as did virtually the entire Afghan political establishment in Kabul. At the same time, Karzai鈥檚 refusal to sign off on the very agreement his representatives had negotiated, combined with increasingly anti-American rhetoric on his part that included claims that聽he didn鈥檛 need American troops to stay聽and which reached its height in聽a bitter farewell address last week, had soured relationships between Kabul and Washington. At several points over the last year, the United States made clear that it would pull all American troops out of the country if the agreement wasn鈥檛 signed, and, for a time at least, disputes over the legitimacy of the election seemed to delay the succession from Karzai to whomever won the election long enough that questions would be raised about whether the US would be able to keep troops in the country at all. As it was, even though the president had announced聽a plan that would keep a small training force in Afghanistan until 2017, there were already聽plans being made for a 鈥渮ero option鈥澛爐hat would have left no troops in country after the end of this year, if it proved impossible to reach an agreement.

Ideally, I would prefer that there be no American troops in Afghanistan after the end of the year. Practically, however, the combination of the fact that the president has been saying for the better part of a year that he preferred if there were a training/Special Forces force left behind for some limited period and what has happened in Iraq in recent months makes this somewhat inevitable. Fairly or not, and I would argue mostly unfairly, the president has gotten much criticism for not leaving a residual force behind in Iraq. Given that, his support for a residual training force in Afghanistan is unsurprising. The question now, of course, is whether that 2017 deadline that the president set in his speech earlier this year will actually hold, or if we鈥檙e looking at the beginning of a far more long-term commitment.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.