By Ankit Panda
After a year of delay, the U.S.-Afghanistan Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) will finally be signed.
The conclusion of Afghanistan’s electoral crisis and the passage of a unity government deal to the satisfaction of once-quarreling candidates Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah has lifted a great deal of uncertainty from Afghanistan’s political future. However, the very same question that loomed last fall still persists: when will the United States (and NATO for that matter) be able to plan for a post-2014 residual troop presence in Afghanistan? Two documents, a Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) in the case of the United States and a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in NATO’s case, will help answer these questions. Afghanistan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, has signaled that he will waste no time in concluding these agreements with U.S. and NATO officials. The agreements will be on the top of Ghani’s agenda following his inauguration as Afghanistan’s 13th president on September 29.
The timeline on the BSA is of particular concern to observers in the United States and indeed around the region. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., claimed that August 2014 represented the last logistically feasible date for the conclusion of the agreement. Any later and the U.S. military will struggle to manage the logistics of pulling its hardware out of Afghanistan while preparing to leave behind a residual force. Given that Ghani won’t officially be president until late in the afternoon on the 29th of September, the Pentagon is likely to have a busy fall planning for the implementation of an agreement that it originally expected to have in hand in late 2013.
Read the full story at The Diplomat