NEW YORK - Ahead of next week’s visit of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to the United States, a leading American newspaper reported Friday that the Obama administration States is nearing a decision to keep more troops in Afghanistan next year than over five thousand it had intended.
In a front page dispatch from Washington, The New York Times said the move effectively upends its drawdown plans in response to roiling violence in the country and another false start in the effort to open peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
President Ghani, a former World Bank executive, will meet with President Barack Obama as well as Secretary of State John Kerry to discuss possible changes to the U.S. timetable to withdraw the bulk of American troops helping to bolster Afghanistan’s still-struggling military.
The new president will travel with Afghan Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister who was defeated by Ghani after a protracted electoral battle last fall. The trip also will include an address to a joint session of Congress and a stop in New York for talks at the United Nations.
The new president has already vastly improved the atmospherics of the U.S.-Afghan relations since his September election, in contrast to the frequent and public clashes that were the norm in the later years of Hamid Karzai’s tenure. One early result: a bilateral security agreement long blocked under Mr. Karzai was signed almost as soon as Ghani took office, allowing up to 10,000 U.S. troops to remain in the country to train and advise Afghanistan’s security forces.
The new president “has been saying and doing things that are music to Washington’s ears,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia analyst, at a briefing this week at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.
As recently as last month, American officials had hoped that a renewed push to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table would yield the beginnings of a peace process and allow the United States to stick with its plan to drop the number of troops in Afghanistan from just under 10,000 to about 5,600 by the end of the year.
But, the Times said,  those hopes have been dashed by signs that the Taliban remain deeply divided over whether to engage in talks, as they have been for years, and that the remaining al-Qaeda presence in the region is proving more resilient than officials had anticipated.
As a result, Afghan and American officials are girding for another year of bloody fighting with the insurgents. Senior Obama administration officials broadly concluded during meetings over the last week that many of the roughly 10,000 troops and thousands of civilian contractors in Afghanistan would be needed well into 2016, officials said.
A change in the administration’s plans would be further evidence of the continuing demands of America’s longest war, which has raged on even after President Obama declared an end to America’s “combat role” in Afghanistan, it was pointed out. It would also reflect the impact of events in Iraq last year, where Iraqi military units collapsed in the face of an offensive by the Islamic State and the administration was compelled to send troops back to the country.
At the same time, according to the Times, the change would expose  Obama to criticism from members of his own party who have pressed him to end America’s military role in Afghanistan. Some of the American officials, who spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified deliberations over troop strength, said there might not be a public announcement on troop numbers to avoid potential criticism that Mr. Obama is backing away from his pledge to end the war in Afghanistan before he leaves office.
The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said on Thursday that President Obama had yet to make a final decision about altering the plans to pull out troops, most of whom are there to train and advise Afghan forces, not to fight. But Earnest added that the president has always said that the military strategy would “constantly be checked against the security situation inside Afghanistan.”
Another senior administration official said that Afghan President Ghani had requested flexibility on the pace of the drawdown, and that “we are actively considering that request.”
Other officials said that the decision was all but made and that only the details had to be worked out. “President Obama has to decide the slope, the pace, of the withdrawal, but all indications are that he’ll delay,” one of the officials was quoted as saying.