[Afghan News] May 20, 2012

[یاسمینه]

NATO chief vows no rush to the exits in Afghanistan
By Jo Biddle | AFP
NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen vowed Sunday there would be no rush to the exits in Afghanistan as more than 50 world leaders gathered for the defense alliance's biggest summit in history.
"Our summit has three key priorities: keeping Afghanistan secure now and in the years to come, keeping NATO strong and capable in the 21st century and keeping our global network of partners solid," Rasmussen told reporters.
Despite plans by France to speed up its own pullout, he pledged: "There will be no rush for the exits. We will stay committed to our operation in Afghanistan and see it through to a successful end."
World leaders and international organizations were due to open their two-day summit later Sunday aimed at cementing a 2014 withdrawal deadline from the decade-long war in Afghanistan and handing over security to Afghan forces.
They were meeting amid tight security in US President Barack Obama's hometown of Chicago, with police deployed along the main arteries, some on horseback, as Coast Guard boats mounted with machine guns patrolled the river.
It is the first summit of the 28-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization on US soil in more than a decade, and comes as the 63-year-old organization confronts shifting 21st-century realities and shrinking defense budgets.
Apart from Afghanistan, Obama and his fellow leaders will take other key decisions, activating the first part of a missile shield for Europe, despite fierce Russian opposition and announcing a slew of military cooperation projects to cope with mounting austerity.
Among the world leaders at the table with Obama will be Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari, who accepted a last-minute invitation to attend.
Despite the stubborn Taliban insurgency, war-weary international forces are seeking to hand control of security to Afghan forces while withdrawing some 130,000 foreign combat troops by the end of 2014.
"This (summit) will be a powerful demonstration of the commitment of the whole international community to the future of Afghanistan," Rasmussen told reporters.
But France has shaken up the carefully crafted withdrawal plan with new President Francois Hollande saying that he plans to pullout French troops by late 2012, a year earlier than planned.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday: "Germany supports NATO's idea: We went into Afghanistan together and we want to withdraw from Afghanistan together."
She dismissed any notion that an early French departure would place an extra burden on the German contingent in Afghanistan.
"I think France will make it clear at the summit what form its commitment will take. I think we still need to wait a little bit longer. We would hope that France would stay within ISAF," she added.
Karzai comes armed with a firm demand for $4.1 billion (3.2 billion euros) a year to fund his security forces after the pullout.
The United States is expected to foot half the bill while hoping the international community will stump up the rest.
Washington is also hoping that Zardari will agree to reopen key NATO supply routes into Afghanistan closed in November after US air strikes killed 26 Pakistani troops.
But the US-Pakistani talks on reopening vital supply routes for NATO forces in Afghanistan have stumbled over Islamabad demand to charge steep fees for trucks crossing the border, a senior US official told AFP.
The official confirmed that Pakistan has proposed an exponential increase in fees, from the current rate of about $250 per truck to "thousands of dollars."
"That's, in a word, unacceptable," he said.
Governments are feeling the pinch as Europe's debt crisis forces budget cuts across the board, and to cope NATO will announce more than 20 joint projects to pool military hardware as part of a so-called "Smart Defense" initiative.
NATO has touted a planned US-led missile shield for Europe as a shining example of military cooperation.
A first step to the shield will be the announcement at the summit of an "interim capability" putting a US warship armed with missile interceptors in the Mediterranean, and a radar system based in Turkey under NATO command.

German Chancellor Merkel Warns Against Rushing From Afghanistan
By Tony Czuczka - May 20, 2012 Bloomberg
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said NATO members and their allies shouldn’t rush to leave Afghanistan, signaling tension within the alliance over France’s vow to leave by year’s end.
Allies in Afghanistan that entered the conflict should withdraw together and Germany will “resolutely defend” that stance, Merkel told reporters today at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Chicago.
France’s new president, Francois Hollande, said on May 18 that he will keep to his campaign pledge to withdraw French combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year, sooner than the U.S. and other allies plan.
NATO members gathering in Chicago are seeking to reach consensus on the way ahead in Afghanistan, a task that will test U.S. President Barack Obama’s diplomatic skills and the political cohesion of the 63-year-old group.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said a rapid unraveling of allied support in Afghanistan risks losing ground gained in recent years.
“A race to withdrawal would only strengthen those who want to sow insecurity,” Westerwelle said in Chicago.
Nations involved in the conflict should “stick with what we agreed” to for a timetable to turn over security responsibility to Afghan forces, Westerwelle said.
Obama has a 2014 deadline for NATO to transfer all combat operations to Afghan security forces. Last year he said that the 33,000 U.S. troops sent in to stabilize the conflict will withdraw by September 2012, just before the U.S. election.
To contact the reporter on this story: Tony Czuczka in Berlin at aczuczka@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Steven Komarow at skomarow1@bloomberg.net

Taliban: NATO nations should leave war like France
By DEB RIECHMANN May 20th, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The Taliban on Sunday urged all NATO nations in Afghanistan to follow France's lead and pull their forces from the war.
The call came in a three-page statement released just as heads of state opened the NATO summit in Chicago to talk about the future of Afghanistan.
The Taliban also on Sunday took responsibility for a suicide bombing in southern Afghanistan.
The newly elected president of France has said he will withdraw all French combat troops from Afghanistan by year's end- a full two years before the timeline agreed to by nations in U.S.-led NATO coalition.
"The declaration of the new president of France, Francois Hollande, that all its troops will be removed from Afghanistan at the end of this year is a decision based on realities and a reflection of the opinion of its nation," the Taliban said in an English version of the statement posted on its Web site.
The Taliban often issues long statements addressed to world opinion during international conferences dealing with Afghanistan.
"We call upon all the other NATO member countries to avoid working for the political interests of American officials and answer the call of your own people by immediately removing all your troops from Afghanistan," the insurgent group said.
It cited a recent New York Times/CBS News poll that found that 69 percent of Americans thought the U.S. should not be at war in Afghanistan.
"So the NATO member countries who claim to be the elected representatives of its people and consider their government the people's government- by the people, for the people- how will they answer the call of their people in this summit?" the Taliban asked.
The Taliban also reiterated U.S. estimates that few al-Qaida fighters remain in Afghanistan.
Routing al-Qaida from Afghanistan has been a key basis for U.S. involvement in the decade-long war.
"The American intelligence networks, including the CIA, state that members of al-Qaida have all left Afghanistan and that there are not more than 50 left, therefore the military presence of America is not for its own security, but a long-term strategy for turning our country and the region into its colony." American officials have given an estimate of less than 100 al-Qaida members.
The United States has denied being an occupying force and has said that it has no interest in establishing long-term military bases in Afghanistan. However, a U.S.-Afghan strategic partnership document signed this month gives the U.S. the option of keeping forces in Afghanistan after nearly all international combat troops withdraw by 2014. Any such force would serve two specific purposes: training of Afghan forces and operations against al-Qaida.
Officials have previously said as many as 20,000 U.S. special operations forces and other troops could remain after the combat mission ends, but that still must still be negotiated.
"They are conjuring artificial excuses to prolong the occupation of Afghanistan, are wavering in their stance and do not seem to have a clear strategy for a political solution," the Taliban said. "The Islamic Emirate (which is what the Taliban call themselves) considers the claims of the invaders of finding a political solution as meaningless until they come out of their fluctuating unstable state."
Violence in Afghanistan continued on Sunday across the country.
NATO reported two of its service members killed in an insurgent attack, while Afghan officials reported that a suicide bomber struck a police checkpoint in Uruzgan province in the country's south.
NATO did not provide any further details on the attack that killed the service members, its location or their nationalities. It was not clear if the two attacks were related.
The deaths bring to 24 the number of foreign troops killed this month in Afghanistan and 156 this year.
Fareeb Ayal, a spokesman for the police chief of Uruzgan province, said a suicide bomber blew himself up at a police checkpoint near a marketplace in Tarin Kot, the provincial capital. Ayal said a NATO convoy was at the checkpoint at the time of the explosion. He said six children were wounded, two of them critically. He said there were some NATO casualties too, but he didn't have details.
Taliban spokesman Qari Youssef Ahmadi said the Taliban were behind the attack.
In other violence, police in western Farah province said that 20 Taliban militants were killed and another 15 were wounded during an operation that began Friday.
Mohammad Ghaws Milyar, the deputy police chief of Farah, said the Taliban were killed during an ongoing operation by the Afghan security forces in the Bala Buluk district. He added that the operation will continue until the end of the week and its goal was to clear the area of Taliban insurgents.
Milyar said two Afghan Army soldiers and a member of the Afghan intelligence services were also killed during a gun battle with insurgents in Bala Buluk on the first day of the operation.
Five insurgents were also killed in a gun battle on Sunday with Afghan police forces in eastern Nuristan province, the provincial governor's office said. The battle started after Taliban attacked a police checkpoint in Nuristan's Kamdesh district. A police office was killed and another was wounded in the attack, a statement said.
Also, a roadside bomb in the northern province of Kunduz late Saturday killed a young student and two police officers, said Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, a spokesman for the provincial police chief.
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Associated Press Writer Mirwais Khan contributed to this report from Kandahar.

NATO leaders seek common path out of Afghanistan
By Missy Ryan and David Brunnstrom
CHICAGO (Reuters) - NATO leaders gather in Chicago on Sunday for a summit that will chart a path out of Afghanistan, as Western nations seek to fend off fissures in their alliance and ensure Afghanistan can hold a still-potent Taliban at bay when foreign troops withdraw.
President Barack Obama hosts the summit in his home town, Chicago, a day after leaders of major industrialized nations tackled Europe's debt crisis, backing keeping Greece in the euro zone and vowing to take steps necessary to revitalize the world economy.
The shadow cast by fiscal pressures in Europe and elsewhere will follow leaders from Obama's presidential retreat in Maryland to the talks on Afghanistan, an unwelcome weight on countries mindful of dwindling support for a costly campaign that has not defeated the Taliban in more than 10 years.
The Obama administration, looking ahead to November presidential elections, is expected to emphasize a common alliance vision for gradually pulling most of the NATO force of around 130,000 by the end of 2014. It will also highlight Afghanistan's strides toward taking charge of its own security.
In addition to the shared fiscal stress, the talks may be characterized by undercurrents of dissent between leaders in Washington, Brussels and other nations, like France, who are more eager to go home.
France's new leader, Francois Hollande, repeated a pledge during his inaugural visit to Washington last week to pull "combat troops" from Afghanistan this year. He has said an extremely limited number of soldiers would remain to train Afghan forces and bring back equipment beyond 2012.
"This decision is an act of sovereignty and must be done in good coordination with our allies and partners," said Hollande, who will discuss his exit plans with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday.
Yet Hollande has declined to define the details of his withdrawal, saying that was France's "business."
The careful French comments, leaving room for various interpretations, illustrate the balance NATO leaders strike as they seek to avoid the appearance of splits with NATO partners without alienating voters who want to see a swift exit.
Alliance leaders may use the same approach in discussions this weekend of long-term funding for Afghan police and army, whose ability to battle the Taliban is at the core of NATO strategy for exiting Afghanistan smoothly.
The Obama administration has been seeking promises from its allies in Afghanistan to give $1.3 billion a year for Afghan forces. While there are few doubts allies will eventually provide support, it appeared unlikely heading into the summit that it would meet that goal by the end of the meeting. ID:nL1E8GIERC]
SHADOW OF FISCAL WOES
A last-minute addition to the list of leaders at the carefully choreographed meeting is President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan, whose western tribal areas provide shelter to militants attacking Karzai's government and NATO forces.
Zardari may encounter friction in interactions with NATO leaders who have been pressing Islamabad to reopen routes used to supply NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. Pakistan shut those routes in protest when U.S. aircraft killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border in November.
It's unclear whether a deal reopening those roads will occur this weekend as U.S. officials had hoped earlier in the week.
Severe fiscal pressures, including plans for major cuts to defense spending Europe and the United States, are sure to color the talks in Chicago, as they did those between G8 leaders.
The overarching message from that G8 summit reflected Obama's own concerns that euro-zone contagion, which threatens the future of Europe's 17-country single currency bloc, could hurt a fragile U.S. recovery and his re-election chances.
The G8 leaders, hoping to put years of financial turmoil behind them, also said the global economic recovery showed promising signs but that "significant headwinds persist."
Austerity has played a role in NATO leaders' efforts to make progress on "smart defense" - making resources go further by encouraging NATO allies to share key capabilities.
NATO is expected to announce a milestone in the effort to provide a pan-European missile defense system, which has now has reached "interim capability." It will also formally endorse an agreement for 14 countries to jointly purchase five U.S.-made unmanned drone aircraft.
(Additional reporting by John Irish and Phil Stewart. Editing by Christopher Wilson)

Getting human rights wrong is not an option
By Nader Nadery Thursday, May 17, 2012 Foreign Policy
On May 20th, the United States will host a summit of NATO leaders in Chicago. Afghanistan will feature prominently in the summit's agenda. The recently concluded Strategic Partnership between the United States and Afghanistan provides a promising basis to build a partnership based on commitment to securing Afghanistan's democratic transition and the protection and promotion of rights for Afghan citizens. Delivering on its promises will require avoiding short cuts that carry the illusion of peace, and instead building a partnership with the real ally of stability: the majority of Afghan citizens.
There is a danger that the global debate is losing sight of the need to protect Afghan civilians and to consolidate the hard-won gains of the past ten years. The search for a quick deal in some American policy circles neatly coincide with those of Afghanistan's opportunistic and survival-driven political class, and especially elements within the government. This narrow policy consensus runs contrary to what most Afghans want: the preservation of the progress that has been won at great cost to both Afghans and the international community since 2001.
A sense of anxiety about what might happen after 2014 pervades Afghan society, and was caused primarily by the sidelining of human rights as a political commitment by both the Afghan government and its international partners since 2007. While the government has demonstrated increasing hostility to its human rights obligations, its international supporters have voiced only muted criticism, lacking penalties or action of any kind.
Against the wishes of generations of war victims, all civil war era actors have been granted broad immunity. The passage of the Shia Personal Status Law infringes on the legal rights of Shia women. The widely-praised Media Law that would have enshrined greater freedom of expression has been shelved. Known human rights abusers have been appointed to high-ranking positions within the national police force, while the Presidential Palace has lent its approval -- sometimes overt, sometimes tacit -- to a succession of regressive statements by the Ulema Council regarding women's rights. Afghan women, civil society, and human rights defenders are rapidly losing the space to speak out and organize freely, and these groups worry, with good reason, that government may soon try to silence them altogether.
The vision articulated by Afghans and their international partners in the Bonn Conference in 2001 entailed a commitment to building a democratic Afghanistan in which human rights and the rule of law prevailed. This vision was later reaffirmed by more than 500 delegates from across the country at the 2002 Loya Jirga. While neither of these historic agreements were flawless, as a participant in both I was filled with high expectations and energized with optimism for my country's future.
Whatever its weaknesses, the progressive vision for a post-Taliban Afghanistan provided civil society with room to grow. Hundreds of civic groups, including many devoted to women's rights, sprung up across the country. With international support and the enthusiasm of a new generation of Afghans, the independent media blossomed as never before in Afghanistan's history. But these gains have had little time to take root, and they are now at serious risk of being crushed.
This is the reality of Afghanistan in 2012. How did we get here?
First, since the end of the transition period established by the Bonn Agreement (2004), the Afghan political leadership has failed to implement an inclusive vision for Afghanistan's future. Instead, the government has opted for the politics of tactical, backroom deals as a strategy for guaranteeing their political survival. This brand of reactionary policy-making appeals to the most conservative and violent elements in Afghan society for support, and ignores the interests and aspirations of the vast majority. Unwilling to speak out or act upon major human rights issues, Afghanistan's political leaders have prevented Afghans from following the path that they chose and enshrined in their constitution in January 2004.
The international community has accepted these worrying trends, and has refrained from exerting real political pressure on the government to comply with its international obligations and the Afghan Constitution. Afghan human rights advocates have lobbied tirelessly, but their arguments, evidence, and pleas have been largely ignored. As time has passed, human rights have been mentioned less frequently in international discussions on Afghanistan and this is reflected in official documents. In the most recent U.N. Security Council resolutions on Afghanistan, passed on March 22, 2012, human rights were relegated to a sub-item.
Emboldened by recent international permissiveness, Afghan leaders have increasingly viewed justice and human rights as more of a luxury than an indispensable prerequisite for peace. In December 2007, President Karzai publicly announced that he would not challenge human rights violators and would not implement the Peace, Justice and Reconciliation action plan adopted by his own government in 2005. The vetting process for police reform that had managed to exclude at least 14 notorious figures from reappointment as chiefs of police was frozen indefinitely in 2007.
Other difficulties have aggravated the situation. The president's lack of desire for political development through political parties has hindered the establishment of active and effective political movements in the country.
In the absence of robust, democratic political pathways through which the majority could voice their aspirations, the Palace has relied instead on figures and factions who represent a tiny portion of society. While democratic voices have consistently marginalized, those advocating a non-representative form of conservatism, the Ulema Council, and a powerful minority seeking their own political and economic interests, have therefore exerted a disproportionate influence over the direction of national policy.
A second reason for the decline of the human rights and democracy agendas has had to do with the evolution of international strategy and priorities. Early on, at least rhetorically, Afghanistan's international partners (the United States in particular) embraced human rights reforms as a component of the state-building strategy in Afghanistan. Over time, however, the focus shifted to defeating the insurgency, then to counterterrorism, and then to containing the insurgency. With this shift towards military objectives, the human rights agenda suffered. The United States embraced nearly any party that would oppose the Taliban, regardless of their human rights records. Afghan prisoners were abused in American-run prisons. Night raids continued, providing powerful recruiting narratives to the Taliban who, undeterred, killed civilians in ever larger numbers with each passing year. Continued partnership between the international military and malign elements of the past contributed to a gradual but steady move of the Kabul government toward embracing the same abusive figures.
President Obama's review of the Afghanistan strategy, released in March 2009, further limited the objectives for the American engagement in Afghanistan, dropping the idea of supporting democracy and human rights entirely. Elements within the Afghan government took this cue and began to neglect their own commitments. Indeed, a senior aide to President Karzai told me that the Palace has come to believe that human rights and democracy are not priority issues for the United States because they want to achieve reconciliation; therefore, "we will also relax our practice and policy on that front".
The alliances between some of the members of the international community, the Afghan government, and local warlords have implications that stretch well beyond human rights issues. Militarily and economically empowered by these alliances the warlords have been able to block merit-based upward mobility in the public and private sectors. By dominating political decision-making in the government, they have established dominant roles for their old militia structure members, guaranteeing specific interest groups hefty government and international contracts while protecting their unaccounted wealth.
Since the current structures protect the warlords and enable their domination, they correctly view reform efforts aimed at good governance, rule of law and human rights as a threat that could drive them from power. Consequently, they have aggressively undermined all such reform efforts, actively manipulating systems. Through their influence at the Palace, a small group of wartime leaders are utilizing government appointments to expand their own network rather than serve the public interest. There is little risk of exposure or accountability and a high return. Those who are being formally appointed by the President (but actually at the behest of unaccountable and influential patrons) feel less loyalty to their official boss than to those who nominated them. The public understands that public office is being used to dole out favors to the informal leaders. Ultimately, public trust in the government is severely undermined.
In a desperate move to end almost ten years of military engagement, in 2011 the U.S. and Afghan governments set two potentially conflicting goals by opting to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban while simultaneously beginning the transition out of Afghanistan. In a situation where the Afghan government is increasingly weak, more hostile toward its international allies, and less capable of winning public support, Afghans fear that negotiating with insurgents from a weak position will further undermine human rights -- particularly the gains made with respect to women's rights.
Ordinary Afghans understand that a settlement at the expense of human rights and democracy will yield a very short-lived peace. Rather, such so-called "peace" protocols are likely to usher in a renewed, and more vicious, round of civil war. The key to a lasting peace by contrast is found in respect and protection of the rights of Afghans, ensuring good governance, and delivering justice for the wrongdoings of the past.
To address some of these problems, Kabul and Washington should consider a number of steps:
Build on the Strategic Partnership Agreement
The Strategic Partnership Agreement explicitly restates the shared determination of the United States and the Government of Afghanistan to achieving the goal of a stable and independent state of Afghanistan, ‘governed on the basis of Afghanistan's constitution, shared democratic values, including respect for the fundamental rights and freedoms of all men and women.' By recognizing and emphasizing the importance of the rights, needs and aspirations of the people of Afghanistan and of democratic values, the agreement is a first step towards reassuring Afghans that constitutional rights and freedoms are non-negotiable. The May conference in Chicago presents an opportunity for the international community to reinforce its commitment to rule of law and human rights in Afghanistan.
Peaceful and timely democratic transfer of power through elections
The end of the constitutional term of President Karzai coincides with the scheduled completion of the transition of security responsibility from international forces to Afghans. The Afghan government must ensure that Afghanistan makes a peaceful democratic transition of political power by 2014. Afghanistan's future stability depends as much on the capability of its security forces and their adherence to human rights and rule of law as it does on a peaceful transition of power to a next elected administration. Both should be key priorities.
President Karzai should therefore announce the date for the 2014 presidential elections, support a genuine electoral reform process and facilitate a peaceful democratic transition of power for the first time in the nation's recent history. The United States, NATO countries, and the United Nations should already be seriously focused on how to support Afghanistan's elections and should take care to learn the hard lessons of 2009 as well as from the positive experiences of 2002, 2004 and 2005.
Accountability
President Karzai should immediately initiate a clear process for holding to account those who are guilty of past crimes, and clarify that any crimes from now on will meet the full accountability of the judicial process. To begin with, he should implement the government's action plan on Peace, Justice and Reconciliation adopted in 2007.
President Karzai and his government should abandon the politics of the back-room deal and embrace the aspirations of the vast majority for good governance, democracy and human rights. To do so, he must engage the Afghan parliament in the formation of policy, and the international community should provide technical support to parliamentary committees. This support would allow legislators to gain the ability to formulate, present and adopt specific policy options to the government, instead of debating in general terms -- and in a reactionary manner -- executive decisions that have already been made.
President Karzai must provide equal space for pro-democracy and reform voices in policy development and decision-making, and the international community should break its long silence when it comes to bringing onboard pro-reform agendas and voices. To facilitate ownership of national processes, the president should create incentives for political parties to generate alternative policy debates. The political parties and Afghan civil society must engage in a much more aggressive, structured, and realistic advocacy campaign for the implementation of reform agendas, and they should press President Karzai to remove from office those whose acts are undermining his own legacy in human rights and democracy. President Karzai must hold accountable officials who are involved in abusive practices and abandon the practice of simply reshuffling them to other senior positions.
Inclusive Talks with the Insurgents and Clearly Defined Redlines
It is also imperative for the government to show that it has begun -- in practice - to make the protection of human rights and promotion of democratic practices the center of its agenda. The Afghan government must publicly and explicitly assure Afghans that all rights and freedoms enshrined in the Afghanistan Constitution and the gains made in the past decade regarding human rights and democratic development are not negotiable in any talks with the Taliban. The United States must do the same.
Nader Nadery served as Human Rights Commissioner at Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and chairperson of Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) based in Kabul.

Sen. Graham: Some U.S. troops must stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014
May 20, 2012 1:32 PM ByLeigh Ann Caldwell
(CBS News) On "Face the Nation," Senator Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) painted an optimistic picture of Afghanistan, saying the U.S. has been doing many of the right things there, including committing counter-terrorism forces beyond the 2014 troop withdrawal.
"I applaud the president for his strategic partnership agreement" with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, Graham said, referring to the agreement signed earlier this month which enables the U.S. to keep a military contingent in Afghanistan beyond 2014. Graham added that it "closes the deal ... on the Taliban's aspirations to come back militarily.
"My view is with about three or four airbases, 20,000 troops left behind past 2014, with American air power and special forces units, the Afghan army will always win a fight with the Taliban," he said.
Graham said NATO needs to play a role, too. "NATO nations need to commit past 2014. If we do that we will get this right," Graham said.
However, during "Face the Nation"'s foreign policy roundtable, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman disagreed with Graham.
"Whenever I hear people saying it's a training problem, I always ask myself, 'Who has trained the Taliban?' Training Afghans to shoot, to fight, that always just has a real dissonance in my ear. I think people fight when they have a will, and it's not just about the way, and I think there are a lot of Afghans that don't want to fight for a corrupt government," Friedman said.
President Obama is currently in Chicago for the NATO Summit with President Karzai. The role of NATO and American troops is a focus of the meetings.

Bomber Strikes U.S. Soldiers in Southern Afghanistan
By TAIMOOR SHAH and ROD NORDLAND The New York Times May 20, 2012
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber on foot attacked a group of American soldiers with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, apparently killing and wounding an unconfirmed number of them.
Separately, military officials reported that two ISAF soldiers were killed Sunday, but would not confirm if that was the result of the same incident, nor would they identify the victims’ nationality pending notification of next of kin.
The suicide bomber’s attack took place in Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province, where both Australian and American soldiers are based. American soldiers were visiting a local police station when the bomber approached them, according to Mohammad Ghulab Khan, chief of the police criminal investigation department in the province.
The resulting blast wounded six Afghan civilians, five of them children aged 8 to 12, Mr. Khan said; the American soldiers suffered dead and wounded, but he did not know how many, he said.
The American soldiers cordoned off the area and medical evacuation helicopters were seen landing and taking off, Afghan officials said.

September 9 Declared National Holiday to Honour Massoud
TOLOnews.com By Mahboba Pardis Saturday, 19 May 2012
Afghanistan's Parliament on Saturday voted to make September 9 a new national holiday to honour national hero Ahmad Shah Massoud and those who die fighting for the country.
September 9 is the anniversary of Massoud's assassination in 2001.
The lawmakers said observing a national holiday in the name of those who are "martyred" for Afghanistan is in the nation's interests and could prevent tribal conflicts in the embattled country.
"September 9 should be named as the day of the martyrdom of the national hero of Afghanistan - this will benefit our national interests," Kabul MP Mohammad Younus Qanoni told TOLOnews.
Massoud was born in 1953 in the Bazarak district of Panjshir province. He became a political and military leader in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation when he returned after a brief stin t in Pakistan to fight against the invasion. The Panjshir valley is known for having never fallen to Soviet control.
He went to Kabul after successfully driving out the Soviet's in 1989. But after several years of civil war in Kabul and other provinces, he returned to Panjshir when Kabul fell to the Taliban and formed a resistance front.
He fought the Taliban for almost five years but was eventually assassinated by two Arab suicide bombers allegedly linked to Al-Qaeda in northern Takhar province on September 9 2001, just two days before the attacks on the US World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

NATO’s Paper Mache Agenda for Afghanistan
By Kevin Baron | National Journal
The Afghanistan-related measures NATO members are expected to adopt in Chicago are a mix of concrete international agreements and paper promises that European capitals may or may not uphold.
Start with the money. NATO members—with defense budgets shrinking and poll numbers against maintaining the war soaring—are expected to commit to some formulation of funding that keeps Afghan National Security Forces’ (ANSF) training and operations running beyond 2014. The United States estimates those costs to shrink from $6 billion per year for the current supersized “surge” force to $4 billion after culling more than 100,000 Afghans from the rolls.
Those agreements may be the only hard-line positions the heads of state adopt, though the real details will come at July’s donor conference in Tokyo. The U.S. and Afghanistan have already signed up for their shares, and Germany last week pledged $190 million annually, but more than two dozen other European countries have yet to climb aboard.
As for combat, no agreement reached in Chicago can predict exactly when and how NATO will morph into the “training” mission expected in Afghanistan (which will occur while counterterrorism fighting carries on overhead.) Training missions have proven expensive—up to $2 billion per year in Iraq, where maintaining and housing trainees cost far more than the actual training. And Iraq could pay much of its bill. Foreign countries have to pick up even greater share of Afghanistan’s training, which cost $12 billion at its peak last year.
The flexibility in NATO’s less-than-ironclad agreements leaves Stephen Larrabee, Rand Corp.’s distinguished chair in European Security, pessimistic.
“I think that a lot of the commitments are paper commitments,” Larrabee argued on Friday, referring to funding the ANSF. “I don’t think there are many European allies that are very enthusiastic at all.”
Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, meanwhile, is signing individual security agreements with NATO members separate from the alliance. Karzai and President Obama this month signed a 10-year deal allowing Americans to stay, though not to seek permanent bases. But new French President Francois Hollande on Friday told Obama he would fulfill a campaign promise to withdraw combat troops early, by the end of this year.
“NATO members have committed to the principle of ‘in together, out together.’ But will they follow through?” wrote Council on Foreign Relations’ Stewart M. Patrick, senior fellow and director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program, on Thursday.
Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon, who believes NATO deserves credit for keeping 40,000 troops in Afghanistan, said analysts dreaded the timing of Hollande’s election and the summit. “This has been a concern ever since it became apparent very early this year that Mr. Hollande would probably win.”
Not everyone is a naysayer. Senate Foreign Relations European Affairs Subcommittee Chairwoman Jeanne Shaheen, R-N.H., in a Foreign Affairs article, argued, “At this year's summit, the West must push back and remind the world that the United States and its NATO allies still wield unrivaled power to shape the world for the better.”
But even Shaheen pressed NATO members to offer something tangible. NATO, she wrote, must “plan a post-2014 relationship with Afghanistan that is credible and realistic. Plans need to include specific troop numbers and financial commitments from alliance members.” She also called for a “more realistic” sized ANSF, one that is affordable.
“The big if,” warned Brookings’ Steven Pifer, senior fellow and director of the Arms Control Initiative, is located far outside NATO’s borders: Who succeeds Karzai? It’s a topic only recently gaining traction in Washington.
“Because if you get essentially the equivalent of a warlord winning, then I think all bets are off, and we'll be trying to, you know, control the damage at that point.”

Charting Obama’s Journey to a Shift on Afghanistan
New York Times By DAVID E. SANGER May 19, 2012
It was just one brief exchange about Afghanistan with an aide late in 2009, but it suggests how President Obama’s thinking about what he once called “a war of necessity” began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House.
Not long before, after a highly contentious debate within a war cabinet that was riddled with leaks, Mr. Obama had reluctantly decided to order a surge of more than 30,000 troops. The aide told Mr. Obama that he believed military leaders had agreed to the tight schedule to begin withdrawing those troops just 18 months later only because they thought they could persuade an inexperienced president to grant more time if they demanded it.
“Well,” Mr. Obama responded that day, “I’m not going to give them more time.”
A year later, when the president and a half-dozen White House aides began to plan for the withdrawal, the generals were cut out entirely. There was no debate, and there were no leaks. And when Mr. Obama joins the leaders of other NATO nations in Chicago on Sunday and Monday, the full extent of how his thinking on Afghanistan has changed will be apparent. He will announce what he has already told the leaders in private: All combat operations led by American forces will cease in summer 2013, when the United States and other NATO forces move to a “support role” whether the Afghan military can secure the country or not.
Mr. Obama concluded in his first year that the Bush-era dream of remaking Afghanistan was a fantasy, and that the far greater threat to the United States was an unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan. So he narrowed the goals in Afghanistan, and narrowed them again, until he could make the case that America had achieved limited objectives in a war that was, in any traditional sense, unwinnable.
“Just think how big a reversal of approach this was in just two years,” one official involved in the administration debates on Afghanistan said. “We started with what everyone thought was a pragmatic vision but, at its core, was a plan for changing the way Afghanistan is wired. We ended up thinking about how to do as little wiring as possible.”
The lessons Mr. Obama has learned in Afghanistan have been crucial to shaping his presidency. Fatigue and frustration with the war have defined the strategies his administration has adopted to guide how America intervenes in the world’s messiest conflicts. Out of the experience emerged Mr. Obama’s “light footprint” strategy, in which the United States strikes from a distance but does not engage in years-long, enervating occupations. That doctrine shaped the president’s thinking about how to deal with the challenges that followed — Libya, Syria and a nuclear Iran.
In interviews over the past 18 months, Mr. Obama’s top national security aides described the evolution of the president’s views on Afghanistan as a result of three rude discoveries.
Mr. Obama began to question why Americans were dying to prop up a leader, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who was volatile, unreliable and willing to manipulate the ballot box. Faced with an economic crisis at home and a fiscal crisis that Mr. Obama knew would eventually require deep limits on Pentagon spending, he was also shocked, they said, by what the war’s cost would be if the generals’ counterinsurgency plan were left on autopilot — $1 trillion over 10 years. And the more he delved into what it would take to truly change Afghan society, the more he concluded that the task was so overwhelming that it would make little difference whether a large American and NATO force remained for 2 more years, 5 more years or 10 more years.
The remaking of American strategy in Afghanistan began, though no one knew it at the time, in a cramped conference room in Mr. Obama’s transition headquarters in late 2008. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who had spent the last two years of the Bush administration trying to manage the many trade-offs necessary as the Iraq war consumed troop and intelligence resources needed in Afghanistan, arrived with a PowerPoint presentation.
The first slide that General Lute threw onto the screen caught the eye of Thomas E. Donilon, later President Obama’s national security adviser. “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve,” Mr. Donilon recalled three years later. “We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.”
So in the first days of his presidency, Mr. Obama asked Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer with deep knowledge of the region, to lead a rapid review. At the time, the president was still speaking in campaign mode. He talked about remaking “an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs” in Afghanistan and a “civilian surge” to match the military effort. But he said little about the Riedel team’s central insight: that Pakistan posed a far greater threat.
“If we were honest with ourselves, we would call this problem ‘Pak/Af,’ not ‘Af/Pak,’ ” Mr. Riedel said shortly after turning in his report. But the White House would not dare admit that publicly — even that rhetorical reversal would further alienate the Pakistanis.
Mr. Obama agreed with Mr. Riedel, but thought the review did not point clearly enough toward a new strategy. To get it right, the president ordered up a far more thorough process that would involve everyone — military commanders and experts on civilian reconstruction, diplomats who could explore a negotiation with the Taliban, and intelligence officials who could assess which side of the war the Pakistanis were fighting on.
But he also began to reassess whether emerging victorious in Afghanistan was as necessary as he had once proclaimed. Ultimately, Mr. Obama agreed to double the size of the American force while training the Afghan armed forces, but famously insisted that, whether America was winning or losing, the drawdown would begin in just 18 months.
“I think he hated the idea from the beginning,” one of his advisers said of the surge. “He understood why we needed to try, to knock back the Taliban. But the military was ‘all in,’ as they say, and Obama wasn’t.”
The president’s doubts were cemented as the early efforts to take towns like Marja in Helmand Province took months longer than expected. To Mr. Obama and his aides, Marja proved that progress was possible — but not on the kind of timeline that Mr. Obama thought economically or politically affordable.
“Marja looks a lot better than two years ago,” one senior official said at the end of last year. “But how many Marjas do we need to do, and over what time frame?”
The tight group of presidential aides charged with answering questions like that — of redefining the mission — began meeting on weekends at the end of 2010. The group’s informal name said it all: “Afghan Good Enough.”
“We spent the time asking questions like: How much corruption can we live with?” one participant recalled. “Is there another way — a way the Pentagon might not be telling us about — to speed the withdrawal? What’s the least we can spend on training Afghan troops and still get a credible result?”
By early 2011, Mr. Obama had seen enough. He told his staff to arrange a speedy, orderly exit from Afghanistan. This time there would be no announced national security meetings, no debates with the generals. Even Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were left out until the final six weeks.
The key decisions had essentially been made already when Gen. David H. Petraeus, in his last months as commander in Afghanistan, arrived in Washington with a set of options for the president that called for a slow withdrawal of surge troops. He wanted to keep as many troops as possible in Afghanistan through the next fighting season, with a steep drop to follow. Mr. Obama concluded that the Pentagon had not internalized that the goal was not to defeat the Taliban. He said he “believed that we had a more limited set of objectives that could be accomplished by bringing the military out at a faster clip,” an aide reported.
After a short internal debate, Mr. Gates and Mrs. Clinton came up with a different option: end the surge by September 2012 — after the summer fighting season, but before the election. Mr. Obama concurred. But he was placing an enormous bet: his goals now focus largely on finishing off Al Qaeda and keeping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons from going astray. Left unclear is how America will respond if a Taliban resurgence takes over wide swathes of the country America invaded in 2001 and plans to largely depart 13 years later.
This article is adapted from “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” to be published by Crown on June 5.

In Afghanistan, New Group Begins Campaign of Terror
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND May 19, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - A new, more radical insurgent group has begun a campaign aimed at terrorizing both Afghan officials and moderate insurgents, according to Afghan officials.
While the Taliban publicly disavowed the new group, Afghan intelligence officials depicted it as a faction of the Taliban that is “behind the current campaign of psychological and terror attacks,” as one official put it.
Calling itself the Mullah Dadullah Front, after a notoriously bloodthirsty Taliban commander who was killed in 2007, people claiming to represent the group have in recent days sent text messages and made telephone calls to numerous members of the Afghan Parliament, threatening suicide attacks if they vote to ratify the strategic partnership agreement between Afghanistan and the United States.
The group also claimed responsibility for the assassination of a former Taliban minister, Mullah Arsala Rahmani, this month.
Mr. Rahmani, who lived under government protection in Kabul, was viewed as a potential intermediary in any future negotiations between the government and the Taliban.
The Dadullah Front’s claim of responsibility “demonstrates that they have the capability to reach far beyond their southern area of operations,” Jeffrey Dressler, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, wrote in an analysis published recently.
The emergence of a new, more extreme insurgent faction could further trouble any efforts to restart the moribund peace process in Afghanistan.
The Taliban disavowed any connection with the Rahmani assassination. After the Dadullah Front claimed responsibility, the Taliban responded that there was no such organization affiliated with the Taliban, and suggested that the group had actually been created by Afghan intelligence.
On Saturday, the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence service, announced that it had arrested three members of the Dadullah Front “who were busy spreading terror and launching a psychological campaign in Kabul.” A spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with his department’s policy, said the three men were arrested in Kabul after an investigation of the messages they had sent. “We believe these three men are part of a bigger network,” he said.
There was no way to independently verify the intelligence service’s claims. The agency has been accused of human rights violations and of using torture to obtain confessions from detainees.
Although President Obama and the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, signed the strategic partnership agreement during Mr. Obama’s visit to Kabul on May 1, the Afghan government submitted the document to Parliament to ratify. It is not clear if the parliamentary vote is binding.
Over the past few days, members of Parliament have received death threats in text messages signed by the Dadullah Front.
Dawood Hasas, a senator from Zabul Province, said he received a text message demanding that he agree to vote against the strategic agreement and warning, “We are a suicide front and we wage jihad.”
“We want an answer in one minute,” the message concluded.
A minute later, Mr. Hasas said, his phone rang and the caller demanded his answer. “I told them they cannot scare me with these threatening phone calls and texts,” Mr. Hasas said. “They told me if that was my decision then I will have the same destiny as Arsala Rahmani.”
Mullah Dadullah was a commander in Helmand Province who was accused of ordering the beheading of a hostage when negotiations for the release of Taliban prisoners broke down. He is also blamed for carrying out particularly bloody massacres in Bamian Province.
Some Taliban officials have said they believe that top Taliban leaders were involved in betraying Mullah Dadullah because he had become too close to Al Qaeda. If there is a group named after him now, that too may be a front for Al Qaeda, the officials suggested.
Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, said the attacks claimed by the Dadullah Group were really the work of one man.
Elsewhere in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber in the Trezi district of Khost Province attacked a police post on Saturday, detonating explosives that killed 10 people: three policemen and seven civilians, including six children who had been visiting the post, according to the district governor, Amir Padishah Dawran.
Habib Zahori contributed reporting from Kabul; Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan; and Farooq Jan Mangal from Khost, Afghanistan.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 19, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the source of the comments from Jeffrey Dressler as having been made in an interview.

NATO summit: Who will foot the bill for long-term Afghanistan security?
A war-weary US faces off with wary NATO allies in Chicago about money and support for Afghanistan after US combat troops withdraw in 2014. Don't expect any "Mission Accomplished" speeches.
Christian Science Monitor By Howard LaFranchi, Staff writer May 19, 2012
Washington - When NATO nations meet in Chicago May 20, one question will top the agenda: What happens in Afghanistan when US combat troops leave?
To be sure, some troops from NATO countries, led by the United States, will likely stay behind after 2014 – both to train Afghans and act as a hedge against the Taliban's return. The summit will try to iron out some of those details.
But perhaps even more crucial – certainly for Afghanistan itself – is the question of who will foot the bill for Afghans to protect themselves. Afghanistan does not have remotely enough money to defend itself. Left alone, it could afford to pay about 30,000 soldiers and police officers. Currently, with international aid, it has more than 300,000 – a number that some experts say is too low.
As a result, much of the Chicago summit will be a passing of the hat for Afghanistan. With NATO countries war-weary and economically strapped, the commitments may not exactly fill that cup to overflowing.
It points to a NATO role in Afghanistan that will continue for years after the end of the international combat mission in 2014, but at a much-reduced and still uncertain level. And it suggests that for all the heady words spoken by NATO leaders, funding and troop pledges for an event still two years away are likely to remain vague.
The two-day meeting "will be something of a tin-cup exercise and should give us some idea of what the [NATO] coalition countries' post-2014 commitments to Afghanistan will look like," says Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
In a clear reflection of this reduced commitment to Afghanistan, the gathering is expected to endorse the scaling back of the Afghan National Security Forces. Army and national police forces once envisioned to hover around 350,000 personnel for years after NATO's departure are now seen as gradually scaling back to something over 200,000 by 2018.
"The idea is to gradually reduce the size of the Afghan forces to make them more affordable," says James Dobbins, a former US Afghanistan envoy and now director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corp. in Arlington, Va.
US share: about $2 billion per year
Pre-summit discussions among NATO countries resulted in a consensus that foresees the US picking up "the largest part of the cost," Ambassador Dobbins says, with other countries making up the rest. That US share is expected to be about $2 billion a year, with other countries making up the difference of an annual bill of about $4 billion.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has indicated that he doesn't think the $4 billion will be enough. During the recent surge, the US was spending about $100 billion a year to maintain its force of 100,000 troops.
Dobbins says he expects the pledges at Chicago to remain general, in part because countries are reluctant to make specific funding commitments for what is still a few years off. Moreover, NATO nations are concerned that promised gains in Afghanistan have not panned out.
"The thinking was that the US surge would kick the stuffing out of the Taliban, they would thus be on the road to defeat, and we'd be handing off a much simpler job," says Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "Instead, in 2015 we'll be handing off a stalemate and a war that in fact is not going to be ending anytime soon."
The reluctance to pledge long-term commitments to Afghanistan extends to the US as well. Some members of Congress are already warning that there is likely to be a dwindling appetite for picking up a $2 billion annual check for the Afghan security forces after 2014 – even as the White House counters that the price tag is a small fraction of the $88 billion the Pentagon expects to spend in Afghanistan in 2013.
Yet even if NATO countries stick to vague commitments, which will be enough to satisfy the modest goal the US has set for Chicago, regional experts say, the US wants to make a decade-long commitment to troop levels and funding in Afghanistan, and it wants to make sure it is not left on its own.
"What [the US wants] is for NATO to endorse that" general commitment, says David Pollock, a former State Department planning staff official now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. But with national budgets tight and with "people convinced that Afghanistan's long-term success is a long shot," he says that "at best [the US] will get a statement of long-term goals – without any long-term commitments."
President Obama wanted to signal this long-term commitment by signing the US-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) in Kabul, Afghanistan, this month.
"That was definitely a setup for the NATO summit, to underline the message that 'the US has done its part, so now you, too, should stand up,' " Dobbins says.
But some analysts doubt that the agreement, which is short on specific US commitments to Afghanistan, will have any impact on the summit.
"The US having failed to sign the SPA by Chicago would have been seriously problematic, but the converse doesn't hold, largely because it commits people to so little," Mr. Biddle says.
What could come from Chicago is a concrete decision formally to shift NATO's mission from combat to training ahead of schedule – in 2013. That transition has already been taking place, Biddle notes, but formalizing it and suggesting that the conditions exist to speed it up could create the perception that NATO is in the mopping-up phase, placating voters and giving NATO members political cover to stay involved a little longer.
"The beauty of changing the mission is that it leaves the political top cover for the allies to stay," Biddle says.
No aura of 'mission accomplished'
Such a maneuver could become even more of an imperative after the election to the French presidency of François Hollande, who promised to have French troops out of Afghanistan by around the end of this year.
Whatever is agreed to in Chicago, no one expects the aura of "mission accomplished" that permeated Mr. Obama's brief mission to Kabul.
Many of America's NATO partners want little to do with Afghanistan, but they also want to stay on the good side of the US and to keep the US committed to the alliance. The result is that coalition countries are likely to come through eventually with commitments, but they will be modest and have more to do with maintaining good relations with the US than with Afghanistan.
NATO countries "will calculate that they can scale down, because they can stay on our good side practically without being" in Afghanistan, says the Washington Institute's Mr. Pollock. Vague talk of long-term commitments aside, he adds, "the drift is to quietly close this chapter in NATO's history."

Pakistani leader may face friction over supply routes at NATO summit
Reuters By Missy Ryan and David Brunnstrom Sat May 19, 2012
CHICAGO - Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari arrived in Chicago on Saturday for a NATO summit to what could be a chilly reception if a hoped-for deal allowing trucks to again supply alliance troops in Afghanistan fails to materialize.
While Western officials sought to portray Zardari's presence as a sign of improving NATO-Pakistan ties, possible friction at the meeting underscores the challenges NATO countries face as they struggle to ensure a stable future for Afghanistan after Western troops withdraw.
Western leaders, who sometimes differ in their visions for the best way to end the war, speak with one voice when they describe Pakistan as the lynchpin to Afghanistan's future security - or continued conflict.
"We can't solve the problems in Afghanistan without a positive engagement of Pakistan," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said hours before Zardari's arrival, repeating a refrain from NATO leaders that Pakistan must do more to act against militants who launch attacks from the country's tribal areas.
Zardari's decision to accept a last-minute invitation to attend the summit in President Barack Obama's home town was an abrupt reversal after months of diplomatic estrangement. Islamabad had made clear that Obama's top aides were not welcome in Pakistan.
It was also initially seen as a sign that Islamabad was on the verge of reopening supply routes through Pakistan that are crucial for NATO troops in Afghanistan.
But now it is far from clear that a deal on those supply lines is imminent.
"It is time for them to make a decision," said a U.S. official. "Patience is not exhausted but it's wearing thinner on the U.S. side."
In a sign of U.S. frustration, the White House said this week that Obama had no plans to meet with Zardari individually, although he is scheduled to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
A RIFT NOT YET HEALED
Pakistan closed the supply routes in November after U.S. aircraft killed 24 of its soldiers along the border with Afghanistan. The incident caused a rift with the United States that has not yet healed as the White House, gearing up for November elections, has rebuffed Pakistan's demands for an apology.
The U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there have been no breakthroughs in talks on the supply routes that many in the Obama administration had hoped would yield an agreement at the summit, which begins on Sunday.
Yet U.S. and NATO officials said the mere fact that Zardari would attend is a step forward.
"Obviously it's important that they are taking part in the summit as it's a big show of support for Afghanistan," said NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu.
The Obama administration is eager to resume more productive ties with Pakistan, whose role will be even more crucial as NATO combat troops begin to withdraw ahead of a 2014 deadline.
"The goal is to re-establish a sense of normalcy in the relationship and we're getting there. It will take time," the U.S. official said.
The Obama administration accuses Pakistan of sheltering militants who attack Karzai's government and NATO troops. Pakistan sees Afghanistan as vital to its security concerns, and wants a say in the country's future.
Islamabad defends its role in combating militants and notes that many of its own soldiers have died in that fight.
"The point here is that Pakistan has cooperated in every effort to hunt down, degrade, destroy and disable al Qaeda. And your military acknowledges that," Sherry Rehman, Pakistani ambassador to the United States, told CNN on Friday.
Zardari's government has voiced its willingness to reopen the supply routes - if an agreement can be reached on fees that will be paid on each shipment going into Afghanistan.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said it was unlikely the United States would accept Pakistani requests to pay as much as $5,000 per military shipment going into Afghanistan.
(Additional reporting by Phil Stewart. Editing by Christopher Wilson)

UK special forces 'to stay in Afghanistan after 2014'
BBC News 20 May 2012
A small number of British soldiers could remain in Afghanistan after forces withdraw in 2014, a senior government official has said.
The official made the disclosure ahead of a Nato summit in Chicago, which is expected to focus on Afghanistan.
David Cameron has set a deadline of the end of December 2014 for Britain to stop all of its combat operations.
But it is understood that up to 200 members of the UK's special forces could stay on to help combat terrorism.
British troops have been in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion in 2001.
Britain plans to withdraw 500 soldiers from its 9,500-strong force this year, with Afghan security forces due to take over responsibility for security by the end of 2014. 'Protect ourselves'
The official said: "As we've said previously, British forces will not remain in a combat role in Afghanistan beyond 2014.
"The majority of forces that remain in Afghanistan will be in a training and mentoring role, for example at the Afghan Officer National Training Academy.
"But I wouldn't rule out a small number of forces playing a counter-terrorism role if needed.
"This would be in keeping with how we are working to protect ourselves from the counter terrorism threat emanating from other parts of the world, such as the Arabian Peninsula."
Last month, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said the UK would fund Afghan security forces after British combat operations in their country cease.
He said the UK would give £70m a year to a £4bn international fund to stop Afghanistan once again becoming a "safe haven" for terrorists.
The first £70m payment would be made in 2015, he said. 'Handing over'
Contributions from other countries are expected to be announced at the Nato summit, which will set out the international community's commitments on security support to Afghanistan after the withdrawal date.
Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the BBC: "We are in a process of gradually handing over lead responsibility for security to the Afghans and that process will be complete by the end of 2014.
"During that process you will see withdrawals of troops, you will see a gradual change of the role of our troops from combat to support.
"It's not in contradiction with our strategy, it's a part of our strategy."
The summit will also consider the future role of Nato itself as economic austerity forces governments to tighten on defence spending.
Mr Cameron is expected to argue that reduced spending on armed forces must not mean any lowering of Nato's ambition, and that it must continue to be prepared to tackle threats beyond its borders.

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