The British paper The Independent reports that Afghan president Hamid Karzai will announce an official timetable for foreign troops to leave Afghanistan. The timetable, which Karzai has long been pushing for, will be announced at a security conference in Kabul on Tuesday said The Independent, which has seen a leaked copy of the communiqué:
It states: "The international community expressed its support for the President of Afghanistan's objective that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) should lead and conduct military operations in all provinces by the end of 2014." This comes just weeks after Mr Hague hinted that British troops could leave by 2014, and is the first formal confirmation of the timescale that governments have been working towards behind the scenes to agree in recent months.
Karzai has not had the leverage Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had back in 2008 to force a withdrawal timetable on a reluctant U.S.. The fact that he'll be announcing the long-sought timeline at the International Conference on Afghanistan, attended by foreign ministers from more 70 countries, including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is a step in the right direction, though it leaves the withdrawal "conditions-based" rather than absolute.
President Karzai will tell delegates that the conference represents "a turning point" in Afghanistan's "transition to an era of Afghan-led peace, justice and more equitable development"....
A senior source in the British military confirmed yesterday that the blueprint was "a significant map laying out the stages on the way to withdrawal". He said: "The British government has been talking in terms of a 2014 withdrawal, but nobody has been able to produce a timetable identifying how and when things would happen. This document demonstrates that there is a will in the international community to have it done by then.
"I cannot stress too much the importance of them having a strategy to do that. In the past, the international community has come up with dates by which they wanted something to happen, but because they had no plans to back them up, too many deadlines were allowed to slip."
While it leaves open the possibility that foreign troops might leave sooner, the conditions required before they can leave - like reintegrating 36,000 ex-combatants, making 24 provinces free of poppy cultivation, having Afghan National Security Forces leading military operations in all provinces - seem unlikely to be achieved by the end of 2014, if ever.