New York - President Barack Obama is 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, a leading American newspaper reported Wednesday, citing a senior administration official.
In a dispatch The New York Times said 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.
Obama’s comments, according to the paper, 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, the report said.
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 - Obama has telephoned Ghani and 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," According to the Times. Obama’s critics have been quick to draw the comparison.
“I predicted what was going to happen in Iraq,” Republican Senator John McCain 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, it was pointed out. 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,” Vali Nasr, a former State Department official who worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan policy, was quoted as saying. “This argument that we can stand up a military to do what we ourselves can’t do hasn’t proven out in Iraq.”
Meanwhile, Afghanistan on Wednesday ordered a New York Times correspondent to leave the country after he wrote an article saying government ministers and officials were threatening to seize power to end a stand-off over election results.
The attorney general's office said the article was "against the national interests and the national security of Afghanistan" and that Matthew Rosenberg must leave within 24 hours.
The move underlined fears that media freedoms gained since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001 are being lost as the US-led military intervention and civilian aid programme in Afghanistan wind down.
"This decision was taken after the attorney general considered his story on the election deadlock and suggestion of an interim government, quoting unknown high ranking government officials," the attorney general's office said. "Since the election, the New York Times has repeatedly published such articles sourcing them to unknown government officials."
It added that Rosenberg had showed a "lack of cooperation" during an investigation into the story.
US State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf on Tuesday urged the Afghan government "to respect fundamental freedoms of expression and expression of the press" after Rosenberg was questioned.
The Afghan government has been paralysed for months after the first round of the presidential election failed to produce a clear winner and the second round of voting in June triggered allegations of massive fraud.