Rising tensions with Karzai

President Obama was to lay out a new plan to NATO allies at a meeting in Lisbon this week to transfer security duties to Afghan troops over the next two years and end NATO combat missions in Afghanistan by 2014. U.S. troops are scheduled to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011; the new 2014 timetable is viewed as a signal to the Taliban that they will face continued military opposition for four more years.

The NATO meeting takes place amid rising tensions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who last week surprised U.S. officials by calling for an end to U.S. raids in southern Afghanistan. Coalition officials say the raids have led to the death or capture of hundreds of Taliban fighters. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, is said to have expressed “astonishment and disappointment” at Karzai’s comments. The clash follows disputes over the Karzai government’s notorious corruption and Karzai’s complaints that NATO troops are killing Afghan civilians. “It’s pretty clear that you no longer have a reliable partner in Kabul,” said one NATO official.

“Karzai needs to learn the art of keeping his mouth shut,” said The Dallas Morning News in an editorial. Statesmen understand that they must measure their words carefully and not indulge a “personal desire to vent.” But Obama’s muddled Afghan policy is the root of the problem. He’s signaled both that Afghanistan is a critical battleground and that he just can’t wait to get out. The president “needs to articulate a clear and unambiguous policy that doesn’t give Karzai justification for continued outbursts.”

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The clock’s ticking on Karzai, said Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation. Barring a peace deal with the Taliban, the new 2014 deadline means “four more years of war.” The good news, however, is that the public debate is now “built around when to end the fighting and transition to the use of Afghan forces.”

Haven’t we been talking about that for years? said the San Francisco Chronicle. “What happened to July 2011”—the month, Obama assured us, that the troops would begin to come home? Just a year ago, the president “implied that the end of the war wasn’t far away.” Now he flails, setting “one deadline after another while our enemies patiently wait us out.”