KABUL – The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martine Dempsey on Thursday said that the U.S. was not planning for any further negotiations over the Kabul-Washington security pact, which continues to await Afghan President Hamid Karzai's signature.
Washington and Kabul have been engaged in negotiations over signing of the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) for well over a year, yet no accord has been finalized. Although many thought the issue was put to rest when the Loya Jirga approved the pact and recommended it be signed as soon as possible, things changed when Karzai set new preconditions and pushed back the timeline to April.
"I think it was clear that over the course of an exhausting negotiations over many months there was a text that was agreed upon and that text was considered to be closed at some points and presented to the Loya Jirga," Dempsey said while speaking at Bagram Air Base. "It's not "our intention to reopen the text and to renegotiate that which had been previously been discussed, and that's not a threat.,
The U.S. has said it and its NATO partners need the BSA to be signed before the end of the year in order to make plans for their troops post-2014, which are expected to fill a training, advising and assisting role for the Afghan forces.
Some 8,000-12,000 NATO troops are expected to stay behind, with the majority of them being American. But without an accord in place, officials in Washington have signaled that no soldiers would stay in Afghanistan, and some 4.1 billion USD in aid to the Afghan army would be cut off.
When asked about the "zero option," which would mean no U.S. military presence in Afghanistan post-2014, Demsey say the option was not being pursued, but that it was clearly a "possibility."
Karzai has come under fire from many Afghan Parliamentarians, civil society activists and the general public for delaying the signing and seemingly flouting the will of the 2,500-person Jirga convened last month.
"If the Bilateral Security Agreement is not signed, it would be devastating for the future of the country," MP Naqibullah Fayeq said on Thursday.
The negotiations between the Afghan government and U.S. officials took eighteen months and the two sides conducted twenty one rounds of talks on the agreement to get it the text for the Jirga ready. (Tolo News)