Obama Holds to Afghanistan Withdrawal Deadline

By MARK LANDLER

President Obama may have ordered American warplanes back to Iraq, but he has not changed his mind about his other big military withdrawal. Mr. Obama told advisers this week that delaying the pullout of American troops from Afghanistan would make no difference there as long as the country did not overcome its political rifts.

The president, a senior administration official said, was rejecting a growing chorus of arguments in Washington that the chaos in Iraq should prompt him to reconsider his timetable for withdrawing the last soldiers from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.

“People have said, ‘Doesn’t this show that you should never take the troops out of Afghanistan?’ ” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “He said, ‘No, it actually points to the imperative of having political accommodation. There’s a limit to what we can achieve absent a political process.’ ”

Mr. Obama’s comments were particularly pointed, given that Afghanistan’s leadership has been paralyzed for months after a disputed election to replace President Hamid Karzai. The stalemate between the two candidates, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, led to fears this week that a cabal of Afghan government ministers with ties to the security forces would seize power and install an interim government.

While Secretary of State John Kerry has been most closely identified with efforts to resolve the dispute — having parachuted into Kabul on two occasions to try to broker a deal — Mr. Obama has telephoned Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah twice each to urge them to work out a compromise.

With its ethnic overtones, the Afghan impasse has obvious parallels to the sectarian rifts in Iraq, which have hindered the formation of a new government and stoked the Islamic militancy there. Mr. Obama’s critics have been quick to draw the comparison.

“I predicted what was going to happen in Iraq,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said on CNN on Aug. 10. “I’m predicting to you now that if we pull everybody out of Afghanistan, not based on conditions, you’ll see that same movie again in Afghanistan.”

Not all the criticism was partisan. Some veterans of the Obama administration argued that the collapse of the Iraqi security forces and the difficulty of forging political compromise in Baghdad were an ominous sign for Afghanistan’s future after the United States departs.

“The entire Afghanistan strategy is based on Iraq,” said Vali R. Nasr, a former State Department official who worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan policy. “This argument that we can stand up a military to do what we ourselves can’t do hasn’t proven out in Iraq.”

Mr. Nasr, now dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said the White House should leave behind a “credible force” to prevent the Taliban from replicating the advances of the Sunni militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and to give breathing space to Afghanistan’s fragile political process.

Such a force, he said, would be larger than the dwindling presence planned by the administration — 9,800 troops in 2015, half that in 2016 and a vestigial force thereafter — but far smaller than the 101,000 troops that were in Afghanistan at the peak of American involvement in 2011.

These arguments have registered in a White House confronting a cascade of crises. While there have been no formal deliberations over Afghanistan since the start of the airstrikes in Iraq, this official said, Mr. Obama has discussed the parallels with his senior aides.

The absence of political accommodation in both countries, the president told them, sharply limits the United States’ ability to help. In Afghanistan, even the presence of nearly 29,000 American soldiers has done little to guide the country past its political crisis.

Mr. Obama, his advisers note, did not pick the “zero option” in Afghanistan, which would have meant withdrawing all troops at the end of this year. The United States will marshal the support of NATO allies to train and equip Afghan security forces. And the president’s personal engagement in the issue since the June election is proof, they say, that the United States is not going to stand by as Afghanistan unravels.

“There’s a middle ground between intervention and total disengagement,” the official said.

But Mr. Obama also made clear, when he announced the timetable for drawing down troops last May, that Afghanistan should not rely on the United States to manage the creation of a more stable society. That was up to its own security forces and elected officials, he said.

“We have to recognize that Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and it is not America’s responsibility to make it one,” the president said, using language he has applied, almost word for word, to Iraq. “The future of Afghanistan must be decided by Afghans.”

Afghanistan is not the only ghost hanging over Mr. Obama’s decision to intervene in Iraq. He himself has invoked the NATO air campaign in Libya in 2011 as an example of the risks of a military intervention that is not backed up with a sufficient political follow-through. The bombs drove Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from power but left Libya in a lethal vacuum that has been filled with feuding militant groups.

Mindful of that, his advisers said, Mr. Obama has tried to keep the pressure on Baghdad to form a government “front and center” and not define the new mission as purely, or even primarily, a military one.

But the president flatly rejects another assertion made by his critics: that his refusal to supply weapons to moderate rebels in Syria, early on, helped light the extremist fuse that exploded in Iraq. Without knowing who the Syrian rebel groups were, officials said, funneling them arms would not have prevented the rise of ISIS in Iraq.

For Mr. Obama, some analysts said, the strongest link between Iraq and Afghanistan is their place in the history of his presidency. “Intellectually, he is beholden to the notion that his greatest legacy is getting us out of those wars,” Mr. Nasr said.