Karzai is unlikely to meet deadline on signing long-term security deal, U.S. envoy says --- The lead American negotiator in talks over a long-term security agreement with Afghanistan has privately warned the Obama administration that its efforts to persuade President Hamid Karzai to sign the document on the U.S. timetable are likely to fail, according to officials. -- The assessment, if borne out, could raise the chances of a hasty and messy troop withdrawal by the end of the year and would leave the administration with little time to assemble a military coalition to remain in Afghanistan after the pullout. --- The assessment, transmitted in recent days in a classified cable by U.S. Ambassador James B. Cunningham, follows the administration’s repeated extension of the deadline for an agreement it originally said it expected to complete early last fall. The White House said this week that the document must be signed within “weeks, not months.” -- In the cable, Cunningham said he did not think Karzai would agree to sign the pact before a presidential election scheduled for April. -- The ambassador’s conclusion is a stark indication of how acrimonious discussions between the two countries have become. On Thursday, in a separate blow to relations, Karzai’s government said it will release 72 high-profile Afghan detainees, turned over by the U.S. military for trial, despite American insistence that they pose a threat to Afghan and U.S. security forces. --- After a year of testy negotiations, the U.S. inability to complete the security accord could open the administration to charges of “losing” Afghanistan if all U.S. troops have to leave. Senior Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio), charged Thursday that President Obama was largely responsible for the ongoing upheaval and al-Qaeda gains in Iraq, where the administration was unable to complete a similar agreement before the final departure of American troops from that country at the end of 2011. -- In an assessment circulated last month, the U.S. intelligence community judged that a total American military withdrawal from Afghanistan would lead to a rapid collapse of central government control to the Taliban and other power brokers in wide swaths of the country. - More, Washingtonpost, at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/karzai-is-unlikely-to-meet-deadline-on-signing-long-term-security-deal-us-envoy-says/2014/01/09/2a9f01fc-7957-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html