Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah are due to arrive in Washington today for a visit that includes working sessions at Camp David led by Secretary of State John Kerry, a meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House and an address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. Ghani also will give remarks to an invited audience and take questions at USIP in a joint webcast event with the Atlantic Council on March 25.

Ghani and Abdullah, who took office in September as part of a power-sharing agreement after last year’s Afghan elections, will start the work week tomorrow with a visit to the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Ash Carter and the Afghan president will thank American troops and veterans who have served in Afghanistan. That action alone illustrates the marked improvement in relations between the two countries since Ghani took over from Hamid Karzai, who had led Afghanistan since the U.S. coalition ousted the Taliban from power in 2001. Karzai had become increasingly acerbic in his criticism of the NATO-led forces operating in his country, souring relations with U.S. military and civilian leaders.

“This is the first time we’ll have an [elected] Afghan president in Washington whose name isn’t Hamid Karzai,” said Andrew Wilder, USIP’s vice president for South and Central Asia programs, in a conference call with reporters on March 20. Ghani will “try to rebuild that partnership.” He and Abdullah “recognize that, without strong international support, it’s going to be very difficult for their new government to succeed.”

Despite impressive advances that Wilder said aren’t acknowledged often enough, Afghanistan faces formidable odds. Fighting is expected to accelerate between Afghan government forces and the Taliban as spring arrives, amid a gradual drawdown of U.S. troops that previously provided indispensable air power, logistics and intelligence and reconnaissance capability. Afghan security forces lost more of their own troops in 2014 than in any year since the U.S. invasion, and this coming fighting season may be “one of the most violent yet,” Wilder said.

Against that reality, the Obama administration is considering slowing the drawdown of U.S. troops so that more will remain in Afghanistan through this coming fighting season. That, in turn, might send important signals to political players and investors that the international community isn’t abandoning Afghanistan, and it may help forestall the exit of international civilian assistance, which relies to a certain extent on the protection of a foreign troop presence and the corresponding interest back home in staying engaged.

'National Security Priority'

There’s this sense that there’s this window of possibility.”
– USIP President Nancy Lindborg

Wilder, who just returned from a visit to Afghanistan with USIP President Nancy Lindborg, emphasized the “critical U.S. national security priority” in staying engaged in Afghanistan for the longer term to prevent it from once again becoming a safe haven for trans-national terrorist groups, as it was for al-Qaida under the Taliban regime. That sanctuary emerged in significant part from the U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan once before, in 1992, after the Soviet Army left and America lost interest.

“We’re already seeing that happen to some extent in eastern Afghanistan, where Pakistani Taliban have created safe havens from which they launched the devastating attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar on Dec. 16,” Wilder said. The attack killed 134 children and more than a dozen others, and it seems to have mobilized support among the public and at least some of Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership to reconsider its traditionally accommodating approach to certain militant groups.

Ghani took the “early and bold as well as politically risky” move to restore relations with Pakistan in hopes that leaders in Islamabad will help persuade Afghan Taliban leaders based in their country to enter negotiations, Wilder said.

Those factors and new signs from China, which has close ties with Pakistan, that it’s interested in playing a constructive role may be creating an important opening, Lindborg said.

“There’s this sense that there’s this window of possibility,” she said.

Yet Afghanistan also is battling a severe financial crisis, with an economy that has largely depended on foreign aid also hemorrhaging domestic tax revenue due in part to corruption. Annual economic growth that once reached almost 10 percent may be slipping close to zero, Wilder said. Ghani is trying to take steps to address corruption, most significantly by reopening the investigation of the nearly $1 billion fraud that led to the 2010 collapse of Kabul Bank, Afghanistan’s largest financial institution. 

So Ghani will make necessary appeals in the U.S. for continued military and economic aid, said Wilder and Ali A. Jalali, a senior expert at USIP who was interior minister in Afghanistan from January 2003 to October 2005.  Wilder said he used to worry that the international community was pouring in more assistance than Afghanistan and foreign aid providers could spend effectively. “I’m now worried that we not go from too much to too little too quickly,” Wilder said.

Toward Self-Sufficiency

The Afghan leader will emphasize that his country seeks to move toward self-sufficiency rather than expecting endless financial, technical and military support, Jalali said.

“Self-reliance does not mean give us everything,” Jalali said. Rather, it means “help us to stand on our own feet.”

Indeed, Ghani and Abdullah said much the same in a joint op-ed published March 21 in The Washington Post.

“Afghanistan is not asking the United States to do our job for us,” the two leaders wrote. “Our ultimate goal is self-reliance.”

That will require a certain level of continued military support, to back up Afghan troops who now have taken over the fighting and to ensure that Taliban offensives don’t upturn the progress the country is making otherwise or reverse advances in prospective peace talks, Jalali and Wilder said.

“The current alignment of forces for the possibility of peace talks is more favorable now than it’s certainly been at any time I can remember in the past decade,” said Wilder, who has worked in or on Afghanistan and Pakistan for 30 years. “You have the regional actors – including Iran, Pakistan, China, the Central Asian states, Russia, Saudi Arabia and certainly the U.S. interested in this peace process moving forward.”

China is “staking quite a bit of their prestige in supporting peace talks,” Wilder said. “There have been Taliban delegations to Beijing, and [the Chinese] have even offered to host the talks.”

Internally, Afghanistan has an opportunity now to build on the “remarkable gains” it has achieved in the past decade, Lindborg said, citing the doubling of literacy rates, greater longevity and the surge of school-aged children, especially girls, into education.

Lindborg said she and Wilder heard repeatedly from political leaders and civic activists in Afghanistan that they feel a sense of cautious optimism, still, from last year’s elections and from Ghani’s early actions in office. But much remains to be done, and progress must be achieved more quickly, particularly in solidifying government appointments that are dividing the Ghani and Abdullah camps and holding up potential reforms. Continued U.S. engagement and support will be pivotal to help move forward both peace and reform, Lindborg said.

“The window of opportunity with the Afghan public won’t stay open forever,” Lindborg said. “I was really struck by a number of civil society leaders who said to me, `There isn’t a Plan B. This has got to work.’”