Reuters As senior US officials head to a major meeting on Afghanistan next week, underlying their talks will be a simple question: what can Washington hope to accomplish there with fewer troops, less money, and less time? US objectives in Afghanistan are far more modest than they were in the months following the Sept. 11 attacks, when the West hoped to replace the Taliban's backwardness and brutality with a secure democracy at the crossroads of Asia. After years in which the war was overlooked and underfunded, President Barack Obama focused this “war of necessity” in 2009 on the threat from Al-Qaeda and on enabling Afghanistan to fend off its enemies for itself. Yet even US goals for Afghanistan today, which include providing a modicum of security, making progress against endemic poverty and improving weak, corrupt governance are in question as Western nations move to curtail their role in a war most officials believe cannot be won on the battlefield. The United States “has yet to present a credible and detailed plan for transition that shows the US and its allies can achieve some form of stable, strategic outcome in Afghanistan that even approaches the outcome of the Iraq War,” Anthony Cordesman, a long-time security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote recently. “Far too many US actions have begun to look like a cover for an exit strategy from Afghanistan.” The US military and diplomatic blueprint, especially for the next two years as foreign troops hand over to local forces, takes center stage ahead of Monday's summit in Bonn, Germany. The meeting, headlined by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, will focus on Afghanistan's economic future and on defining the West's future presence in Afghanistan. Despite plans to steadily shrink its Afghanistan force, the Obama administration has vowed it will not abandon the country as the West did following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Officials link investment in a long-term presence in Afghanistan - which could include bases and a major diplomatic footprint even after most foreign combat troops go home at the end of 2014 — to defending US national security. Obama scored a major victory this spring in his tightly focused approach to the war when US Navy SEALs tracked down Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan and killed him. The military mission on the ground in Afghanistan, however, has been much broader than just defeating Al-Qaeda. US commanders say Obama's 2009 decision to deploy an extra 30,000 troops has paid off in the Taliban's southern heartland. They now hope to connect that to the capital. Yet the outlook in the country's rugged east, where militants from the Haqqani network and other groups crisscross the lawless border with Pakistan, is much more troubling. A series of high-profile attacks this fall, including an assault on the US embassy in Kabul and the assassination of the former Afghan president, the country's top official for peace talks, also rattled the narrative of improving security. “We have important work to do inside Afghanistan. I will say that a great deal of progress is being made. Insurgents have been under increasing pressure,” Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters on Friday. “The enemy remains dangerous, and they are capable of violence, as we have seen, regrettably,” he said. Many worry that an array of militants, in the absence of enough foreign troops and an adequate improvement in local security forces, will plunge Afghanistan back into major violence. __
