We show that the NP-complete problems max cut and independent set can be formulated as the 2-local Hamiltonian problem as defined by Kitaev. The 5-local Hamiltonian problem was the first problem to be shown to be complete for the quantum complexity class QMA — the quantum analog of NP. Subsequently, it was shown that 3-locality is already sufficient for QMA-completeness. It is still not known whether the 2-local Hamiltonian problem is QMA-complete. Therefore it is interesting to determine what problems can be reduced to the 2-local Hamiltonian problem. Kitaev showed that 3-SAT can be formulated as a 3-local Hamiltonian problem. We extend his result by showing that 2-locality is sufficient in order to encompass NP.