WASHINGTON — President Obama promised President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Wednesday that the United States would remain in Afghanistan for the long haul, even as he vowed to stick to his timetable to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011.
But a highly choreographed joint news conference in the White House East Room was marked more by what was not said than by what was.
Mr. Obama made few allusions to the corruption and drug trafficking that American officials say has fueled the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. His only direct mention of corruption was to praise, not chide, Mr. Karzai for what Mr. Obama called the “progress that has been made” to halt corrupt acts.
Mr. Karzai, for his part, did not mention his threat last month to join the very Taliban organization that American troops are fighting in his country — and neither Mr. Obama nor the four reporters called on by the two presidents to ask questions brought up that subject. Rather, Mr. Karzai spoke about his visit on Tuesday to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he met with Americans wounded in Afghanistan.
“It was a very difficult moment for me, Mr. President, to meet with a young man, a very, very young man, who had lost two arms and legs,” Mr. Karzai said. “It was heart-rending. And there were others wounded, too, just like I had seen in Afghanistan.”
Both men sought to play down the sharp differences between the governments over the past few months, as the White House pressed its new strategy of using carrots and kind words, instead of sticks and pressure, with Mr. Karzai. The two leaders painted a picture of an Afghan-American relationship that was cordial and full of shared goals.
“We are reaffirming our shared goal to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda and its extremist allies,” Mr. Obama said. He said that friction between the them — and indeed, between Mr. Karzai and just about every senior American official except Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — was “overstated.”
Mr. Obama did not repeat his rebuke last November that there had been “drift” in Mr. Karzai’s efforts to tackle corruption. (He rephrased it this time as “some drift in the relationship” between the United States and Afghanistan.) He did not mention Mrs. Clinton’s warning in November that civilian aid would depend in part on how Mr. Karzai performed in areas like curbing cronyism. Nor did he refer to Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, seated in the front row, who sent a diplomatic cable last fall denouncing Mr. Karzai as “not an adequate strategic partner.”
And Mr. Obama did not repeat the public remarks last month of his national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, who said that Mr. Obama wanted to try to make Mr. Karzai “understand that in his second term, there are certain things that have been not paid attention to, almost since Day 1,” like battling corruption.
It was a week after those comments by General Jones that Mr. Karzai threatened to join the Taliban if the West did not stop pressing him, and he said that American forces in Afghanistan could come to be seen as occupiers.
With a smiling Mr. Karzai standing by his side, Mr. Obama said, “With respect to perceived tensions between the U.S. government and the Afghan government, let me begin by saying a lot of them were simply overstated.”
The administration’s weeklong public embrace of Mr. Karzai comes as the White House is engaged in a high-profile campaign to reassure Mr. Karzai and his government that the United States will not abandon Afghanistan, despite Mr. Obama’s promise to begin withdrawing American troops next summer.
Mr. Obama’s announcement last year of the withdrawal date alarmed Mr. Karzai and his government, with many officials complaining that the plan gave the Taliban an incentive to step up their attacks, because it was clear that they, and not the American military, would be in Afghanistan in the future.
Administration officials have also calculated that the limited success of their public pressure on Mr. Karzai, which led to his threat to join the Taliban, suggests that they should change tactics.
While embracing Mr. Karzai publicly, the administration is also working to build relationships with other members of the Afghan government. To that end, members of Mr. Karzai’s cabinet were invited to join him on the visit, a strategy that is aimed at making Mr. Karzai less central, according to several Obama administration officials.
Mr. Obama said that he supported Mr. Karzai’s efforts to reach out to some Taliban followers, adding that as long as they renounced their ties to Al Qaeda and extremism, the government could “reintegrate those individuals into Afghan society.”
He said that “the incentives for the Taliban to lay down arms, or at least portions of the Taliban to lay down arms, and make peace with the Afghan government in part depends on our effectiveness in breaking their momentum militarily.”
“And that’s why we put in the additional U.S. troops,” he said.
But a senior administration official said Wednesday that the American military operation in Marja had not yet progressed to the point where American troops could hold their gains, let alone transfer them to the Afghan Army. The slow pace of the effort in Marja, foreign policy experts said, suggests that the coming American military effort in Kandahar, the Taliban’s heartland, will undoubtedly be even more difficult.
