WASHINGTON, Nov 22: The United States insisted on Friday that the deal to keep US troops in Afghanistan after 2014 needs to be signed by the end of this year, although Kabul has already rejected the call for an early signing.
US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told a briefing in Washington that Secretary of State John Kerry spoke with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday and conveyed this message.
“Further delay is neither practical nor tenable…it is imperative that it is signed as soon as possible,” she said.
The delay “would make it impossible to plan for post 2104 deployment… and the Afghan people also want certainty whether the US will be there post 2014,” she added.
President Karzai told a tribal gathering in Kabul on Thursday that he would sign a bilateral security agreement with the United States “properly and with dignity” after the April 2014 elections in Afghanistan.
But US Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel warned that without a security agreement, “I don’t think the president is going to commit to anything. He’s said that. And my advice to him would be to not.”
Mr Hagel and other US officials explained that no American administration would keep its troops in another country without the legal and security guarantees such a deployment required.
The United States plans to withdraw most of its combat troops from Afghanistan by 2014 and if the security deal is signed in April, as President Karzai proposed, the Americans will only have eight months to prepare for an expected future deployment for 10 more years.
Mr Hagel said that the delay would put America’s military planners in a “very, very difficult position” as they will not have enough time to plan future deployments in such a short time.
“If this issue rolls into next year, it is going to be very difficult for my responsibilities, along with our military, to go beyond just the planning stages,” Secretary Hagel said.
But earlier on Friday, a spokesman for President Karzai rejected the US call to sign the security pact by the end of the year.
“We do not recognise any deadline from the US side,” said Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for President Karzai. “They have set other deadlines also, so this is nothing new to us.”
But the White House also endorsed the defence secretary’s position, saying that the United States needed a swift decision from President Karzai to start planning the post-2014 deployments.
“Failure to get this approved and signed by the end of the year would prevent the United States and our allies from being able to plan for a post-2014 presence,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
