NATO seeks final plan on Afghan exit

Summit in Chicago to complete strategy

President Obama shakes hands with Afghan President Hamid Karzai during their meeting on the first day of the NATO summit in Chicago.

CHICAGO — NATO leaders began a two-day summit Sunday that will finalize plans to turn over control of Afghanistan to its own security forces by the middle of next year, a milestone on the way to concluding the alliance’s combat role by the end of 2014.

President Obama and other NATO leaders acknowledged the challenges ahead even as they set out the process for ending the international combat role in Afghanistan.

NATO members are cutting defense budgets, facing public opposition to the war, and preparing for months of difficult fighting against the Taliban as the number of U.S. and European troops steadily declines across Afghanistan.

As Chicago police confronted demonstrators whose protest against the war and economic policy was kept well away from the heavily guarded summit, Mr. Obama welcomed the 27 other government leaders to his “home town” and pledged that the 2014 deadline will mean that “the Afghan war as we understand it is over.”

“There will be no rush for the exits,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said as the summit got under way.

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NATO’s plan is to shift full responsibility to Afghan forces for security across the country by the middle of next year and then withdraw most of the alliance’s 130,000 combat troops by the end of 2014, Mr. Rasmussen said.

The summit’s initial session dealt with non-Afghanistan issues.

The alliance agreed to “operationalize” a missile defense system whose component parts are already in place in four European countries.

The system, to protect Europe against ballistic missiles potentially launched from Iran and elsewhere, is expected to have limited capability by 2015 and to be fully operational by 2018.

NATO also signed contracts for its own ground surveillance system, agreeing to purchase and deploy five unarmed Global Hawk drones that will give the alliance capabilities that until now have been available only from the U.S. military.

The alliance also moved forward on efforts to more equitably share the cost and contributions to defense operations, now shouldered largely by the United States, and avoid expensive overlaps in capabilities.

No leader raised the subject of the ongoing violence in Syria, said Ivo Daalder, U.S. ambassador to NATO.

While “we are very much concerned about the situation of Syria,” Mr. Rasmussen said, the alliance has “no intention whatsoever to intervene.”

Although formal meetings on Afghanistan were not scheduled until today, that issue is clearly the summit focus.

While they prepared to declare Afghan forces will have the lead military role throughout the country by mid-2013 and looked ahead to complete combat withdrawal at the end of 2014, leaders warned of what Mr. Obama called “hard days ahead” between now and then.

“I don’t want to understate the challenge that we have ahead of us,” said Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. “The Taliban is a resilient and capable opponent,” and “we fully expect that combat is going to continue” as troops are gradually withdrawn over the next 2 ½ years.

Even as the mission evolves to an advisory role, General Allen said, NATO will retain “short-term capabilities” to shift back into the fight if necessary, even in regions that already have been “transitioned” to the Afghans. General Allen offered a stern warning that the plan to give Afghan forces the lead in fighting next summer won’t take coalition troops out of harm’s way.

“It doesn’t mean that we won’t be fighting,” the general said. “It doesn’t mean that there won’t be combat.”

He will give an update today to an expanded summit meeting that will include all 62 member nations of the coalition in Afghanistan, plus Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

Mr. Obama held a separate meeting with Mr. Karzai early Sunday to discuss the terms of the plan NATO is expected to approve.

In public remarks after the 75-minute closed-door session, they mutually acknowledged the sacrifices both nations have made.

Mr. Karzai — whose relations with the White House have often been testy — expressed gratitude for “the support that your taxpayers’ money has provided us over the past decade and for the difference that it has made to the well-being of the Afghan people.”

Administration officials said Mr. Obama also discussed with Mr. Karzai the administration’s hope the Afghan president, whose term ends in 2014, will move forward on electoral reforms toward a smooth political transition to coincide with the final combat troop withdrawal.

Mr. Zardari received a last-minute invitation to the summit after U.S. and Pakistani negotiators indicated progress toward an agreement that would reopen border crossings through which NATO supplies reach Afghanistan.

Hopes that the deal would be concluded before the summit were not realized, however, as the two sides continue to haggle over new tariff rates Pakistan wants to impose.

Pakistan closed the roads nearly six months ago in protest of an errant NATO air strike that killed Pakistani soldiers.

Mr. Zardari had no separate meeting with Mr. Obama but held a lengthy session with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

NATO’s 2014 exit plan was agreed to at its last summit, 18 months ago in Lisbon. Since then, public anti-war feeling has risen across the alliance, with some members — most recently France’s new socialist government — indicating plans to pull combat troops as early as this year.

The summit is only the third in NATO’s 63-year history to take place in the United States, and it is unfolding against the backdrop of widespread economic crisis and budget cutting among the alliance’s 28 members.

Mr. Rasmussen, in remarks opening the two-day summit, said the meeting’s focus would be on “security in an age of austerity.”

At today’s meetings, leaders are expected to discuss the expense of continued support for Afghanistan’s security forces after 2014.

The United States spent $12 billion last year, 95 percent of the total cost, to train and equip an Afghan army and police force that is expected to total 352,000 by this fall.

With a gross domestic product of about $17 billion, Afghanistan is incapable of funding a force that size.

NATO also plans to begin discussion of what the U.S. and NATO presence in Afghanistan will look like after the 2014 withdrawal deadline.