News Analysis: Ghani's U.S. visit underscores shaky security situation in Afghanistan

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is in Washington this week in a bid to shore up relations with the U.S., spotlighting a shaky security situation in Afghanistan as the war-torn country is not yet ready for U.S. troops to leave.

U.S. President Barack Obama said Tuesday he will delay the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and leave a residual force of 9,800 there through the end of this year. Reductions next year will be based on conditions on the ground.

Despite plans to cut U.S. forces in half this year, Obama agreed to the Afghan president's request to slow the withdrawal in a bid to help continue to build Afghan forces.

President Ghani clearly seeks a relationship considerably more cooperative than sought by former president Hamid Karzai. "He recognizes what Karzai refused to admit: the Afghan government ... is on relatively shaky ground, both militarily and politically," Wayne White, former deputy director of the U.S. State Department's Middle East Intelligence Office, told Xinhua.

James Phillips, a Middle East expert at the Heritage Foundation, echoed those thoughts, saying that Ghani's visit indicates that bilateral relations are much improved, compared with the Karzai administration.

"President Ghani is a much closer ally and more dependable friend than President Karzai was in recent years," Philips told Xinhua.

That close relationship may be necessary, based on the wobbly footing of Afghanistan's security forces.

White said Afghan security forces remain inadequate to combat the Taliban. In terms of a multi-dimensional structure to block a Taliban revival or the establishment of Islamic State affiliates that President Ghani fears, the Kabul government, run so ineptly and corruptly for so long by Karzai, remains an iffy structure upon which to build a robust bulwark against the Taliban, he said.

There are still portions of the country over which neither the Kabul government nor coalition forces could ever establish meaningful control, so no level or extended length of support could transform the Kabul government and its security forces into truly national institutions capable of controlling the entire country, he said.

One fundamental problem affecting the Afghan army is the country's diversity. The army has too few Pashtuns, and some of those in the ranks ranging from unreliable to moles for the Taliban. Occasional attacks against coalition training cadres by Afghan army personnel vividly illustrates this problem.

It is highly unlikely that Afghan security forces will ever have the wherewithal to suppress the vast bulk of Taliban or other militant activity. Afghanistan is, by nature, more unruly and difficult to govern centrally than other regional states even though most of the others also grapple with some of the same problems, White said.

Phillips said the Afghan National Army in particular needs continued air support, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, intelligence support and logistics help, adding that Afghan forces will probably always need some degree of help, but not always on the same scale that they currently receive.

White added that one of the major burdens on Ghani and coalition military trainers now is damage control regarding the diminished credibility of the Kabul government among Afghans, as well as the ill-will bred toward the U.S. and U.S. military forces resulting from Karzai's misrule and inflammatory rhetoric.

Washington's worst nightmare is another 9/11 style attack, whereby al-Qaida operatives struck New York and Washington and killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001, having planned the attack from bases in Afghanistan. That prompted a 13-year war to kick out and then keep out the Taliban, which controlled the country in the 1990s and gave safe haven to al-Qaida.

U.S. and Afghan officials are now worried that affiliates of Islamic State, the radical Islamist group that has taken vast swaths of Syria and northern Iraq, could gain a foothold in Afghanistan, as al-Qaida once did. Endite