Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani’s trip to the U.S. next week is being heralded as a new chapter in U.S.-Afghanistan relations.
“This is a different relationship,” said National Security Council Afghanistan senior director Jeff Eggers.
“It’s important that our leadership and audience in Washington see this …. more positive vision,” referring to the difficulties the U.S. had in getting Ghani’s predecessor, Hamid Karzai, to sign a bilateral security agreement to set the conditions under which U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan.
Eggers and State Department Afghanistan Special Representative Dan Feldman briefed reporters Friday on the extensive plans for Ghani’s five-day visit to Washington and New York, where Ghani will meet with “virtually everybody” in the government’s executive and legislative branch policy leadership, representatives of the media and prominent private-sector policy groups, Eggers said.
Ghani is scheduled to arrive Sunday. He will begin his trip with a small dinner with Secretary of State John Kerry and a few other officials that evening, to look over the schedule for any last-minute refinements.
On Monday, he is scheduled to visit the Pentagon to address troops there and then head to Camp David for a long day of talks with Kerry, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
On Tuesday, he will have breakfast with Vice President Joe Biden, visit Arlington National Cemetery and then spend the rest of the day at the White House before participating in a joint press conference there with Obama.
At that press conference, Obama and Ghani are expected to discuss the results of months of negotiations about slowing the drawdown of U.S. troops so base closures and departures of U.S. forces don’t provide the Taliban opportunity to destabilize the new government’s gains this spring, during what has traditionally been the start of the Taliban’s fighting season.
Eggers said the discussion is expected to focus on short-term adjustments and will not address whether the U.S. would keep a larger residual force in Afghanistan past the end of 2016, when it is expected to have drawn down to a contingent of about 1,000 troops to secure the U.S. embassy and staff an office of security cooperation.
On Wednesday, Ghani will address a joint meeting of Congress, and spend time on Capitol Hill meeting the congressional leadership and Afghanistan caucuses, such as the Afghanistan Women’s Caucus, a group of female congresswomen who make an annual trip to Afghanistan to meet with female leaders there. On Thursday, he heads to New York to meet with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the editorial boards of major newspapers.
The expectation for the visit, Eggers said, was to set “a different face on Afghanistan, given the new administration by President Ghani. This is a different relationship, clearly more cooperative and better.”
