NATO summit: Who will foot the bill for long-term Afghanistan security?

The reluctance to pledge long-term commitments to Afghanistan extends to the US as well. Some members of Congress are already warning that there is likely to be a dwindling appetite for picking up a $2 billion annual check for the Afghan security forces after 2014 – even as the White House counters that the price tag is a small fraction of the $88 billion the Pentagon expects to spend in Afghanistan in 2013.

Yet even if NATO countries stick to vague commitments, which will be enough to satisfy the modest goal the US has set for Chicago, regional experts say, the US wants to make a decade-long commitment to troop levels and funding in Afghanistan, and it wants to make sure it is not left on its own.

"What [the US wants] is for NATO to endorse that" general commitment, says David Pollock, a former State Department planning staff official now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. But with national budgets tight and with "people convinced that Afghanistan's long-term success is a long shot," he says that "at best [the US] will get a statement of long-term goals – without any long-term commitments."

'We'll be handing off a stalemate'

President Obama wanted to signal this long-term commitment by signing the US-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) in Kabul, Afghanistan, this month.

"That was definitely a setup for the NATO summit, to underline the message that 'the US has done its part, so now you, too, should stand up,' " Dobbins says.

But some analysts doubt that the agreement, which is short on specific US commitments to Afghanistan, will have any impact on the summit.

"The US having failed to sign the SPA by Chicago would have been seriously problematic, but the converse doesn't hold, largely because it commits people to so little," Mr. Biddle says.

What could come from Chicago is a concrete decision formally to shift NATO's mission from combat to training ahead of schedule – in 2013. That transition has already been taking place, Biddle notes, but formalizing it and suggesting that the conditions exist to speed it up could create the perception that NATO is in the mopping-up phase, placating voters and giving NATO members political cover to stay involved a little longer.

"The beauty of changing the mission is that it leaves the political top cover for the allies to stay," Biddle says.

No aura of 'mission accomplished'

Such a maneuver could become even more of an imperative after the election to the French presidency of François Hollande, who promised to have French troops out of Afghanistan by around the end of this year.

Whatever is agreed to in Chicago, no one expects the aura of "mission accomplished" that permeated Mr. Obama's brief mission to Kabul.

Many of America's NATO partners want little to do with Afghanistan, but they also want to stay on the good side of the US and to keep the US committed to the alliance. The result is that coalition countries are likely to come through eventually with commitments, but they will be modest and have more to do with maintaining good relations with the US than with Afghanistan.

NATO countries "will calculate that they can scale down, because they can stay on our good side practically without being" in Afghanistan, says the Washington Institute's Mr. Pollock. Vague talk of long-term commitments aside, he adds, "the drift is to quietly close this chapter in NATO's history."

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