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BRUSSELS, Belgium — Officially speaking, NATO won’t deviate — yet — from its plan to end combat in Afghanistan by 2014. But as defense ministers prepare to meet here on Thursday, some NATO bureaucrats are whispering that it wouldn’t be so difficult to wrap the fighting up ahead of schedule.
In a background briefing for reporters, a NATO official I’m not allowed to name pointed to mid-2013 as the beginning of the final phase for its “transition” to Afghanistan control. By then, the “lead responsibility for the planning and conduct of operations” against the Taliban will fall to the Afghan soldiers and police (and militiamen) that NATO trains, the official said. In other words, the heavy lifting on the transition will basically be done by 2013, not 2014.
That may not seem like much of a difference, at first glance. But NATO is likely to reopen the inter-alliance debate about how fast to hand over Afghanistan to the Afghans when defense chiefs begin a mini-summit on Thursday. That’s because Afghan President Hamid Karzai and French President Nicolas Sarkozy abruptly decided last week to ask NATO to end combat a year earlier, in 2013.
If that isn’t enough to get wavering European allies, whose economically crunched populaces generally don’t support the war anyway, to rush to the exits, NATO flacks fended off question after question on Wednesday about a leaked U.S. military report assessing that the Taliban — even after the surge — considers its victory “inevitable.” Now at least some in NATO headquarters believe that if the alliance really wanted to leave early, it would be doable.
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