When President Obama sits down with Ashraf Ghani — Afghanistan’s new president — on Tuesday, both sides are eager to begin a new chapter and turn the page on years of acrimony, suspicions and tensions that have plagued the relationship throughout Obama’s time in office.
Hamid Karzai, Ghani’s predecessor, was a constant thorn in Obama’s side, questioning U.S. military activity in the country and refusing to sign a bilateral agreement to keep a residual level of U.S. forces there — all the while taking millions of dollars from the U.S. government while failing to crack down on rampant corruption.
The new Afghan president couldn’t be more different. He spent Monday at the Pentagon thanking U.S. troops who served in Afghanistan for their 14 years of sacrifice to his country and readily signed a bilateral status of forces of agreement soon after reaching a power-sharing agreement with his electoral rival Abdullah Abdullah.
“This is a different relationship than we had under President Karzai,” Jeff Eggers, senior director for Afghanistan and Pakistan for the National Security Council, told reporters Friday. “It’s clearly more cooperative and better.”
“It’s important that our leadership and the audience here in Washington sees that qualitatively different relationship and that more positive vision,” he added.
In fact, Ghani’s mission is in many ways the polar opposite of Karzai’s. Instead of questioning America’s every move, Ghani’s engaged in an uphill effort to woo Obama — to persuade him to change his stance and commit more troops and resources to his country after he leaves office in early 2017.
Ghani, who spent 15 years in Washington working at the World Bank, is familiar with the ways of Washington and acutely aware of the political pressures Obama faces.
“There is a personal chemistry between Ghani and President Obama — and there’s something to be said for that,” Bharath Gopalswamy, acting director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, told the Washington Examiner. “He’s been in Washington and he knows how this place works and knows the political constraints President Obama is under.”
Brookings Institute’s Michael O’Hanlon says the differences between Ghani and Karzai is partly due to their personalities but also to shifting political realities.
“The United States is now much closer to being out of Afghanistan than committed to it long-term. As such, Ghani’s position is not as artificially inflated as Kazai’s was when the latter was president — especially during the Obama years, and his country and his office were among the most scrutinized on Earth, and he was a very famous man,” O’Hanlon said. “Ghani is more down to earth — by temperament, but also by reality, and by the evolved nature of the US-Afghan relationship.”
In addition, Ghani, he said, is more capable of understanding these “strategic fundamentals” than Karzai was.
“[Karzai] was far from unintelligent, but as the years went by, the job wore him down, and he became perhaps too tactical, and also too caught up in drama with individual officials, especially in the US, but also in other parts of NATO, and Pakistan,” he said. “Ghani is less vulnerable to such meddlings and machinations.”
Ghani also appears more media savvy than his predecessor, sitting down with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell Monday morning and pressing the point that the Islamic State is operating inside Afghanistan and is eyeing the country as a strategic foothold in its broader war to establish a caliphate in the Middle East.
“Fortunately, we’ve prevented them from acting… But we have sufficient evidence that they were targeting us because to their narrative, to their story line, Afghanistan is central,” he told Mitchell.
The message served as a one-two punch. It will inevitably stoke drawdown worries among lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who Ghani will address on Wednesday, and hits Obama where he is most vulnerable on foreign policy: his failure to predict the rise of the Islamic State and the group’s bloody ransacking of Iraq.
Ghani is playing into some dramatic shifts American opinion about the U.S foreign policy since the rise of the Islamic State last summer. Obama came to power when U.S. opinion about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at their lowest and the president was swept into office in part because of his promises to end both conflicts.
But the rise of ISIS and its brutality have ushered in a sea-change in American views. One Quinnipiac poll from March 4 found that 62 percent of all Americans now support the use of U.S. ground troops to fight the Islamic State versus 30 percent who oppose. Those supporting U.S. airstrikes are even more overwhelming.
Ghani’s push to keep more U.S. troops in Afghanistan after Obama’s time in office is already producing some mild friction. The White House in recent days has said Obama will still stick to his decision to end the longest war in American history by the time he leaves office, but is reconsidering the drawdown process and how quickly troops depart.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest clarified Friday that the end goal remains the same. The only change under discussion, he said, was the sequencing of the U.S. base closures in the country and the number of troops to keep in the short term to keep some of the bases open longer than planned for security reasons.
“Obama, he said, has identified 2016 or the beginning of 2017 as a “pretty clear” endpoint for the drawdown.
“By the end of 2016, he would envision the kind of military footprint like we’ve seen in other countries where we have a continued presence focused on protecting the embassy and where we have a strong military-to-military relationship,” he said.
Pressed on the troop-level issue ahead of Ghani’s visit, White House National Security officials pointedly avoided saying whether the president was open to reconsidering higher troop levels post-2016.
A reporter asked how important does the White House consider demonstrating flexibility in those troop levels in order to preserve security gains and avoid the chaos in Iraq following the U.S. withdrawal there.
“It wouldn’t be at this level with this intensity of discussion if it weren’t important,” Eggers responded, noting that any shift in troop levels would be connected to the Afghans ability to defend themselves against threats from the Islamic State and a Taliban-led insurgency.
Still, Eggers suggested that U.S. support for Afghanistan would be increasingly “financial and diplomatic in nature” as the troop levels continue to go down.
“Our commitment to Afghan stability will remain strong, but it will manifest increasingly through those other forms of financial and diplomatic support,” he said.
