Frustrated Obama says he'll withdraw troops from Afghanistan if no security deal is reached

Washington (CNN) -- We're not bluffing, the Obama administration told Afghanistan on Tuesday in announcing for the first time it has started planning for the possible withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of the year if no security agreement is signed.

Statements by the White House and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel showed President Barack Obama's impatience with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's refusal to sign the agreement that would keep several thousand American troops in the country after combat operations conclude this year.

In a phone call with Karzai on Tuesday to discuss upcoming elections for a new Afghan leader, Obama made clear that time was running out to properly plan for keeping any U.S. forces in the country beyond 2014, the White House said.

Meanwhile, a senior Pakistani official warned that pulling out U.S. troops could have dire consequences, leading to a civil war in Afghanistan.

Original Quill wrote:

Ben_Reilly wrote:

That is true; I wonder what would work? It's not like everyone there has been happy with the Taliban, but it doesn't seem that the citizenry has been able to do much about it.

Muslim countries have an ideology that glorifies violence, even though they are not very good at it.  It's pure folly to try to amend their ways merely because we can impose more force than they can.  As you can see, as soon as you turn your back they snap right back into their old ways.

For the record andy and smelly, this war was started in Washington, not in Westminster.  An Iraqi invasion was on the books far before 9-11.  Cheney and Rumsfeld just took advantage of an opportunity that presented itself on September 11th.  The Muslim War (allow me the license to rename both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts) was a part of a movement started at the University of Chicago, by the noted professor of political science, Leo Strauss.  It was later called the Neocon movement, short for neoconservative.  It's core principle was American Exceptionalism: the belief that America started the worldwide movement for freedom and democracy, and hence it was America's to spread the ideology throughout the world--once the Russian Bear had been defeated, of course.  Pawns in the influence of the cold-war victor, the British had very little choice in the matter.

The period of the GW Bush administration will go down as the worst in American history.  It is the classic paradigm of the ignorant being led/manipulated by those who have no responsibility, and intend not to acknowledge their responsibility, should it come to that.  It is the story told by Shakespeare with Iago and Othello, and Cassius and Brutus.  In that vacuum came the amoral era of renewed Nazism, accompanied by kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder, along with destruction of the notion of Constitutional rights and true freedom, and escorted in the worst economic debacle since the 1929 crash.  That is the great triumph of the RW, and it will go down in history as their legacy: never let the wealthy have time to think too much.

Barack Obama--perhaps the third greatest president of the US ever--has done an excellent job of picking up the pieces.  He avoided a renewed crash of the economy in October 2008, He accomplished the quite simple task of ridding the world of Osama bin Laden--something that GWB was too inept to do--he has wound down these two farces of a war, and he has managed us through the great deficit in which the RW has left the world.  He has done all of this amongst the rubble of the racist Republicans, who have vowed to commit sedition rather than work with an African.

The responsible Americans left, maintain a fervent commitment to the notion that the Republican Party has so damaged itself that it will lay down and simply die.  In its ashes, it is hoped that a more reasonable, less dogmatic group with bring the RW back to the realm of responsibility.