KABUL, Afghanistan ? The Taliban are not beaten, the peace process is bogged down in internal squabbles and Afghan security forces aren't ready to take control of the nation. Yet the U.S. and its partners are talking about speeding up ? rather than slowing down ? their exit from the war.
It's becoming dramatically clear that politics is driving NATO's war exit strategy as much or more than conditions on the battlefield.
Political calendars in the West were never supposed to influence the decision about when Afghan forces take the lead and allow international troops step back into support roles or leave altogether. The U.S., Afghan and other international leaders have said repeatedly that transition decisions would not be held hostage to international political agendas.
Then, after an Afghan soldier gunned down four French troops, President Nicolas Sarkozy suddenly announced last week that he was pulling French forces out of Afghanistan early. Sarkozy is facing an opponent in the coming presidential election who wants French forces withdrawn even faster.
Sarkozy boldly suggested that his NATO allies hand over security to the Afghan police and army in 2013 instead of by the close of 2014 ? an end date they had all agreed upon at a meeting in Lisbon more than a year ago.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta dropped another verbal bombshell this week at a NATO meeting in Brussels. He said the NATO allies had largely agreed to step back from the lead combat role in Afghanistan and let local forces take their place as early as 2013.
U.S. officials downplayed Panetta's statement, saying it was not a policy change but an optimistic look at the established 2014 end date.
Either way, it shows how badly the Obama administration wants out of the war.
Panetta's comment sounded different from what his predecessor told NATO allies just six months ago. "Resist the urge to do what is politically expedient and have the courage of patience," former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said then.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said no final decision has been made but he noted the issue would be prominent in May, when President Barack Obama hosts the next NATO summit.
That meeting, in Obama's hometown of Chicago, will come less than six months before the U.S. presidential election. There has been speculation that Obama might announce some kind of accelerated pullout or simply underscore how America's involvement in Afghanistan is winding down.
"I definitely think there is a desire to say something appealing by Chicago," said Mark Jacobson, former deputy NATO civilian representative in Afghanistan and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington.
He said Sarkozy's decision to fast-track France's exit clearly reflects his need to address pressing domestic pressure to bring forces home as his presidential re-election campaign begins. Politics, "however undesirable," always accompanies any coalition mission, he said.
Announcing that the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan will wrap up earlier than expected would give Obama more good news to report about his foreign policy. Already, the U.S. military has officially declared the end of its mission in Iraq in December 2011 when the last American troops left. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed in May 2011 during a U.S. raid in Pakistan. And reviled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi fell under a NATO onslaught without a single American casualty.
Lisa Curtis, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, said U.S. commanders in Afghanistan realize that American public support for the war is evaporating but they don't want to squander military gains of the past 18 months.
"The fear is that President Obama, under pressure from other NATO members and wanting to strike a popular chord with the U.S. electorate in an election year, will announce a drastic reduction in U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2013 at the NATO summit in Chicago," Curtis said.
"By announcing a quicker transition to an Afghan security lead without drastically cutting troop numbers, the secretary of defense may be trying to meet the conflicting U.S. political and military goals," she said.
Assessments of the coalition's progress vary depending on who is asked, but nobody says the war against the Taliban has been won.
The coalition reports that violence is down in some areas of the country, Taliban fighters have lost territory and hundreds of their midlevel commanders have been killed and detained. The insurgency is "clearly on the back foot," says German Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, a spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan.
The latest Afghan National Intelligence Estimate, however, warns that the Taliban will grow stronger and continue to fight for more territory, according to U.S. officials who have read the classified document. The estimate also warns that the Taliban will use discussions about prospects for peace to run out the clock until foreign troops leave.
It says the Afghan government largely has failed to prove itself to its people and likely will continue to weaken and find influence only in the cities. Meanwhile, peace moves toward the Taliban appear fraught with differences between the Afghans and their international partners over the venue and President Hamid Karzai's complaints that the U.S. is trying to control the process.
Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, says the development of Afghan national security forces is in a "state of total confusion."
"Major elements of the Afghan security forces cannot possibly be ready to stand on their own by the end of 2014," Cordesman wrote in a report this week.
So far, Karzai has reacted cautiously to the idea that the bulk of the handover to Afghan forces could occur in 2013. He hasn't commented on Panetta's remark, but after France announced it was leaving early, Karzai said: "We hope to finish the transition ... by the end of 2013 at the earliest ? or by the latest as has been agreed upon ? by the end of 2014."
Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, a Karzai adviser who has played a key role in trying to broker peace with Taliban leaders and lure their foot soldiers off the battlefield, said NATO should make sure that the transition to Afghan forces is successful.
"We should not rush up everything," said Stanekzai, who was seriously wounded when a suicide attacker posing as a Taliban peace envoy killed the head of the Afghan peace council last year. "We have to be cautious about the situation on the ground."
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Deb Riechmann has covered the Afghan war since November 2009.
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