Home > EARTH ALLIES 22.5.2012... IDENTITY OF ANONYMOUS IS... HEART & EQUALITY FOR ALL... MESSAGE TO NATO... Kucinich: NATO is a cost-sharing organization that finances aggressive military action... NATO Ryan Crocker to step down as US ambs. to Afghanistan...
Ryan Crocker will be leaving his post as ambassador to Afghanistan this summer. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
The US ambassador to Afghanistan[5] is to step down after just a year in the job, leaving behind a hard-won deal defining long-term relations between Kabul and Washington but a tangle of other challenges for his successor.
The state department said Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat who came out of retirement to take charge of the embassy in Kabul last July, is leaving because of health reasons.
Crocker was tasked with trying to reset an often tense and acrimonious relationship as a gradual drawdown of US combat forces got under way. Victoria Nuland, the state department spokeswoman, said he would leave in "midsummer".
Nuland highlighted his "enormous achievements" including the strategic partnership agreement that sets a framework for US-Afghan ties beyond the 2014 departure of combat troops, and two deals on Afghan prisons and special operations that paved the way for the wider pact.
"These achievements are the guarantee that as Afghanistan moves to a brighter future secured by its own capabilities, it does so in sovereign and equal partnership with the United States[6] in particular and the international community generally," Crocker said.
