Ghani Acknowledges U.S. Soldiers
President Ashraf Ghani, in an address to a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday, said Afghanistan owed a “profound debt” to the U.S. soldiers who were killed and wounded in Afghanistan.
Video by AP on Publish Date March 25, 2015. Photo by Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times.WASHINGTON — When Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, stepped up to speak at a formal dinner in his honor this week at the State Department, he looked out at a room of familiar faces, a fact he quickly made clear.
He referred to Madeleine K. Albright, seated beside him, as his “mentor.” He called Secretary of State John Kerry, the host, “a remarkable friend of Afghanistan.” He joked that retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, who sat one table over, rarely slept while commanding American forces in Afghanistan.
“I need glasses to see everybody,” he said.
The ties that bound Mr. Ghani to many of the dinner guests on Tuesday reflected a little-noticed story in America’s longest war: After more than 13 years of nation-building in Afghanistan, much of the American national security establishment is intimately familiar with many of the nation’s most senior officials, Mr. Ghani foremost among them, and loath to see a hasty withdrawal lead to a repeat of what has happened in Iraq.
Obama to Slow Withdrawal in Afghanistan
President Obama, in an appearance with the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, said that delaying the withdrawal of the 9,800 American troops stationed in Afghanistan would be “well worth it.”
Video by Reuters on Publish Date March 24, 2015. Photo by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times.So when Mr. Ghani landed in Washington on Sunday to start his first visit here as president, he came prepared for a number of appearances, speeches and meetings that were choreographed by Afghan and American officials to produce a renewed United States commitment to Afghanistan. And that is what Mr. Ghani achieved on Tuesday after meeting with President Obama, who announced that the United States was backing off plans this year to cut by nearly half its force of roughly 9,800 troops in Afghanistan.
The two men said the troops were needed to train and advise Afghan forces, who are doing the bulk of the fighting, through what is expected to be a bloody summer push by the Taliban. Other American officials also said that keeping the current force in place would allow American special operations troops and the Central Intelligence Agency to operate in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the insurgents are strongest and where Al Qaeda’s presence is concentrated.
Yet the shift in American plans is as much a result of the dire situation in Afghanistan as it is a broad lobbying effort by a powerful cross-section of the American foreign policy and national security establishment, including many of the dinner guests on Tuesday. In recent months, even as Mr. Obama has sought to draw an end to America’s role in Afghanistan’s war, a number of influential figures in Washington have pressed hard in public and in private to keep the United States involved.
To help make their case, they repeatedly cited the election of Mr. Ghani, a Columbia graduate who lived in Washington for 15 years, as a central reason to stay in Afghanistan, despite the relative weakness of his government. Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting at the White House, for instance, a group of 23 former American ambassadors and senior officials released an open letter urging the United States to keep troops in Afghanistan.
“Everybody was willing to help with the trip. Senators, congressmen, generals, secretaries of state,” said an American official involved in planning the visit. The official asked not to be identified because the Obama administration does not want Mr. Ghani portrayed as being too close to the United States, an image that plays badly in Afghanistan.
“Look, the Afghans, they can be maddening,” the official said. But, he added, with Hamid Karzai, the former Afghan president whose anti-American rhetoric exhausted good will in Washington, now out of office, “it’s amazing how many people are willing to help out if the Afghans ask.”
To be sure, Mr. Ghani is not slavishly pro-American. For example, he once helped torpedo a new measure regulatingmining in Afghanistan, which was pushed hard by American officials but which Mr. Ghani saw as too friendly to foreign businesses. And he advised Mr. Karzai to release prisoners from the former main American prison in Afghanistan last year, a move that infuriated American officials.
Mr. Ghani and many of his advisers also know the United States well, and they decided to thank soldiers for their sacrifices, and taxpayers for the billions spent to aid Afghanistan in every speech Mr. Ghani gave in Washington, officials from both countries said.
But American officials helped the Afghans choreograph some of the more poignant touches, such as inviting the widow of an American general killed in Kabul last year by an Afghan soldier to a speech Mr. Ghani delivered on Monday at the Pentagon, allowing the Afghan leader to thank her publicly for her family’s sacrifice.
There was also behind-the-scenes lobbying, and not all of it came for free. Shortly after taking office in September, Mr. Ghani’s government hired the Podesta Group for $50,000 a month to lobby on behalf of Afghanistan and help with public relations, according to filings with the Justice Department. One of the founders of the firm is John D. Podesta, who served as counselor to Mr. Obama and represented the administration at Mr. Ghani’s inauguration. Mr. Podesta is no longer involved with the firm.
Mr. Podesta, in fact, was one of the 14 dinner guests on Tuesday to whom Mr. Ghani referred by name in his remarks. As a result of the groundwork laid by many of those guests, the Obama administration was largely in sync with Mr. Ghani even before this week’s visit.
On Wednesday, Mr. Ghani’s final full day in Washington, it was congressional critics of the war, who have been put off by wasteful spending and Mr. Karzai’s tone, that the Afghan president sought to win over.
In an address to a joint meeting of Congress, Mr. Ghani reprised much of what he had said over the previous days. He again cited the more than 2,300 Americans killed in Afghanistan, and he stressed the need for his country to become more self-reliant.
Afghanistan, Mr. Ghani declared, must tackle corruption if the country hoped to shed its dependence on foreign aid. He spoke of the threat posed by Islamist militants, and, seemingly well aware of his audience’s current fears, he raised the prospect of the Islamic State making inroads into Afghanistan.
And, as he has done throughout his trip, Mr. Ghani highlighted his familiarity with the United States. The Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center was “horrific, and it was personal,” he said, noting that his wife also earned a degree from Columbia and that both of his children were born in New York.
“I was another beneficiary of America’s wonderful generosity,” he said. And then, to the delight of the gathered senators and representatives, he added, “I ate corned beef at Katz’s, New York’s greatest, greasiest, pickle-lined melting pot.”