KABUL: An Afghan grand assembly Sunday endorsed a crucial security agreement allowing some US troops to stay on after 2014, although President Hamid Karzai set conditions for signing the deal.
The “loya jirga” gathering of about 2,500 chieftains, tribal elders and politicians overwhelming backed the pact setting the terms for any US military presence beyond 2014, and urged Karzai to sign it by the end of this year.
Karzai did not explicitly address when the deal would be signed, but said it would only go ahead under certain conditions.
Opening the jirga on Thursday, he said he wanted to delay signing the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) until after the successful completion of April’s presidential election — exasperating Washington, which wants it sealed quickly.
Supporters say the BSA is vital for the period after 2014, when the bulk of NATO’s 75,000 remaining troops will pull out, as the Afghan government remains fragile despite 12 years of war against Taleban insurgents.
Karzai laid out conditions for signing the BSA, including US “cooperation” in efforts to make peace with the Taleban, who have led the 12-year revolt against Karzai’s government and its foreign backers.
“This agreement should lead to peace. If it does not lead to peace, it will lead to disaster,” he said.
“The Americans should cooperate, and bring peace. If this agreement leads to peace, on my eyes, I will endorse, and accept your order and sign it.” After four days of discussions under tight security in Kabul, jirga delegates anxious to conclude the deal with Afghanistan’s main financial and military partner said in their closing statement that Karzai should sign the BSA before the end of 2013.
“Given the current situation, and Afghanistan’s need... the contents of this agreement as a whole is endorsed by the members of this Loya Jirga,” said the statement read by jirga deputy Fazul Karim Imaq.
Karzai also stipulated that there could be no more US military raids on Afghan homes, a sensitive topic that threatened to derail the deal last week.
“If the US goes into Afghan homes one more time, there will be no agreement. I repeat, if they go into our homes one more time, there will be no agreement,” he said.
The pact must be approved by the Afghan parliament before it can go into effect. But the question of when it would be signed has largely overshadowed discussions of its content in recent days.
The US State Department warned that failure promptly to sign the pact — which governs the conditions of any post-war American counter-terrorism and training mission — could jeopardize billions of dollars in vital aid to the war-torn country.
The White House has said it needs a swift decision to start planning the movement of US troops, and warned that President Barack Obama had not yet decided whether to keep any American forces in Afghanistan at all beyond 2014.
A spokesman for the US embassy in Kabul said the Americans “continue to believe that concluding the agreement as quickly as possible will benefit both nations.”
Analyst Fardin Hashemi said that despite Karzai’s comments he expected the deal to be signed soon.
“Afghanistan needs US aid to function and the continuation of the aid has been conditioned on a signing of the pact before the end of the year,” he told AFP.
Karzai’s long-time ally and the jirga chairman, Sebghatullah Mojadidi, threatened to leave the country if the president refused to sign the pact. Other delegates shouted: “Sign it, sign it!” The president told delegates he would “work on the agreement and continue bargaining” after they made recommendations for the deal.
These included the return of Afghan detainees held at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
They also asked that American soldiers accused of crimes in Afghanistan should be put on trial in courts on US bases in the country.
A draft text of the BSA released by Kabul last week appeared to show Karzai had bowed to a US demand that American troops would remain exempt from Afghan jurisdiction if they are accused of crimes.
A similar security deal between the United States and Iraq collapsed in 2011 over the same issue, leading Washington to pull its forces out.
Karzai told delegates the BSA would allow up to 15,000 foreign troops to stay, though Washington has stressed that no final decision has been made.
Afghan ‘loya jirga’ backs US troops pact; Karzai sets terms
Afghan ‘loya jirga’ backs US troops pact; Karzai sets terms
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
