It’s been a dozen years but on Thursday the House finally voted to end the war in Afghanistan. By backing an amendment to a military spending bill, all but 9 Democrats and just over half the Republicans removed House Republicans’ language supporting a post-2014 military presence in Afghanistan and replaced it with a statement that the President should come back to Congress and specifically seek new authorization if he wants to keep troops there after the 2014 deadline.

The bipartisan amendment was sponsored by Jim McGovern (D-MA), Walter Jones (R-NC), Barbara Lee (D-CA), John Garamendi (D-CA) and Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee Adam Smith (D-WA) and passed 305-121, with 112 Republicans and 9 Democrats voting NO. So which 9 Democrats? Half a dozen reactionary Blue Dogs and New Dems, two conservaDems who vote with the New Dems (Bill Enyart and Dutch Ruppersberger) and one confused elderly lady (Corrine Brown). The reactionary Blue Dogs and New Dems:

• John Barrow (Blue Dog/New Dem-GA)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Pete Gallego (Blue Dog-TX)
• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
• Bill Owens (New Dem-NY)
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)

It’s worth remembering these names when the DCCC asks you for money because several are on the DCCC Frontline list. That means part of any contribution you make towards the DCCC will go to fund the reelection efforts of pro-war reactionaries John Barrow, Pete Gallego, Jim Matheson, Bill Owens, and Bill Enyart. A better way to contribute to Democrats is give support directly to candidates whose legislative agenda you agree with. Blue America offers a well-vetted bunch of candidates for House seats who would make Congress– and the congressional Democratic Party– better, not worse. Like state Rep. Carl Sciortino, who’s running for the Massachusetts seat Ed Markey is goving up to move over to the Senate.

“My father served in Vietnam,” he told us this morning. “My brother and close friends served in Afghanistan and Iraq. An entire generation has been asked to serve in two wars, and then told “good luck paying for them.” This is an issue that is close to my heart. I am glad to see a majority of Congress voting to support this combat mission coming to a close.

“Just because there is progress on ending the Afghanistan conflict, it does not excuse the members who voted for misguided hawkish policies over the past decade. The time when we really needed a principled vote was in fall of 2002– when we could have stopped a war we already knew was unnecessary. It’s easy to vote to end a war long after its popularity has faded. Remember, 82 Democrats in the House of Representatives voted to authorize the war in Iraq, instead of standing with our principles and leading. We needed members of Congress to stand up and demonstrate to the American people that the War in Iraq was completely unnecessary– instead of folding and becoming pawns of the Bush foreign policy doctrine.”

Blue America is well aware that Carl and other other House candidates will be congressmembers who do stand up– and not just against bad ideas from Republican presidents, but against bad ideas from Democratic presidents as well. That’s why we’re asking our supporters to consider contributing to Carl and the other Blue America candidates.

And what happens if we stay?

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the same week the CIA reassured Hamid Karzai that nothing– including the Sequester here– would slow down the cascade of bribes for him and his circle, he assured the Pentagon they could keep 9 bases in Afghanistan after the occupation officially “ends.”

The C.I.A.’s station chief here met with President Hamid Karzai on Saturday, and the Afghan leader said he had been assured that the agency would continue dropping off stacks of cash at his office despite a storm of criticism that has erupted since the payments were disclosed.

The C.I.A. money, Mr. Karzai told reporters, was “an easy source of petty cash,” and some of it was used to pay off members of the political elite, a group dominated by warlords.

The use of the C.I.A. cash for payoffs has prompted criticism from many Afghans and some American and European officials, who complain that the agency, in its quest to maintain access and influence at the presidential palace, financed what is essentially a presidential slush fund. The practice, the officials say, effectively undercut a pillar of the American war strategy: the building of a clean and credible Afghan government to wean popular support from the Taliban.

Instead, corruption at the highest levels seems to have only worsened. The International Monetary Fund recently warned diplomats in Kabul that the Afghan government faced a potentially severe budget shortfall partly because of the increasing theft of customs duties and officially abetted tax evasion.

Fancy that! Well, “we” get the 9 bases (if Karzai isn’t hung by his heels the day the U.S. flies out of Kabul– if he isn’t on that last helicopter or already living comfortably in Dubai or New York).

The U.S. wants to keep nine bases in Afghanistan after American combat troops withdraw in 2014 and the Afghan government will let them as long as it gets “security and economic guarantees,” President Hamid Karzai said Thursday in his first public offer in talks about the future relationship between the two uneasy allies.

Not long ago, I got into a friendly argument with a couple of progressive congresswomen who are unambiguously antiwar. And they both vote that way. But they had mixed feelings about withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan “yet.” Their concern, an understandable– if wrongheaded– one, was that “we” needed to help liberate Afghan women. Don’t get me started. I lived in Afghanistan twice– in 1969 and, for a briefer time in 1972– and not just in Kabul, but in smaller towns and in the countryside in a settlement with two family compounds. Afghan women need help, all right– but it’s not coming at the end of a bayonet… or a drone strike.

I arrived in Delhi last year on the day of the horrific gang rape that shut the city down for a week. On local TV I noticed that everyone was angry about the rape– very angry. But eventually I figured out that there were two distinct camps with anger pointed in very different directions. At first all the man-in-the-street interviews were with folks in Delhi, men and women, and they were outraged that their society was still so primitive and backward and conservative that gang rapes like this happen frequently. Eventually the man-in-the-street interviews started including unpaved streets. In the villages the anger was directed towards the victims of these sexual assaults. “How dare these women dress like that or go out without a brother or father accompanying them?” These women were ruining India. 

India is at least a century ahead of Afghanistan by any measure. So are longtime American allies Morocco and Jordan. Right now I’m in the middle of Rana Husseini’s heartbreaking book, about “honor” killings in Jordan, Murder in the Name of Honor. I’ll be talking at greater length about Husseini’s book in the future but I was started today when I read the reaction to her activism on behalf of women by a Member of Parliament who is the former Justice Minister, Abdul Karim Dughmi: “All women killed in cases of honor are prostitutes. I believe prostitutes deserve to die.” Believe me, if relatively modern, westernized countries like India, Morocco and Jordan have this kind of mindset– watch the video below– the U.S. doesn’t have the attention span or the will to help the women in far more backward, xenophobic and conservative Afghanistan.

What do you know… the same cheerleaders for the disastrous war in Iraq, the endless, draining occupation of Afghanistan and the intervention in Libya are the very same people and special interests urging– demanding– that we attack Syria. Israeli dreams coming true! And believe me, Lindsey Graham and John McCain don’t give a rat’s ass that the new CBS/NY Times poll shows that the majority of Americans– across the political spectrum– don’t want anything to do with the mess in Syria.

Sixty-two percent of Americans continue to say the United States does not have a responsibility to intervene in the fighting in Syria, while 24 percent of Americans think the United States does have a responsibility to do something about the fighting between government forces and anti-government groups there– a four point increase since last month.

These are the same people who think the only way the GOP can defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016 is by inventing and perpetuating a false narrative called “Benghazi!” when intervention in Syria would, in all likelihood, make the Libya mess look positively utopian in comparison. Exactly two months ago I suggested that Obama call a plebiscite to get direction from the American people– instead of the Military-Industrial Complex special interests, Israel and their shills– on what to do about Syria. At the time, an always disgruntled McCain was bitching to the press (about Kerry’s announcement that the U.S. would send “non-lethal” aid to the Syria insurgents): “It’s a half measure. And I know from my sources that many of those weapons [provided by other countries in] are not getting through… are going to the wrong people, these jihadist outfits. And here we are 23 months into it, 70,000 dead, so it’s a small half-measure.” But Republicans in Congress are a hot mess and pulling in a million directions. Rubio joined Lindsey Graham in demanding the Administration start sending weapons to Syria, while House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon muttered darkly that arming groups “doesn’t work very well for us. At some point, they start using bullets to shoot back at us.”

Aside from the Likud, AIPAC and a bunch of crackpot evangelicals who want to bring Jesus back, who wants to see Americans fighting in Syria (or against Syria’s ally, Iran)?

Are there any “good guys” in this civil war? I heard Mouaz al-Khatib, head of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, yelling at that time that the U.S. should stop measuring the beards of the fighters and just arm them. That means– stop trying to figure out who’s a terrorist and who isn’t. And he’s right… about that. Ultimately, they’re almost ALL terrorists, at least by the U.S. definition. Any weapons or resources the U.S. gives these people will be eventually used against the U.S. and against Israel, (which is now illegally drilling for gas in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights). That’s a knowable known, to paraphrase one of Chuck Hagel’s recent predecessors even if there is no strategy and the U.S. is riding a tiger.

And in light of the Austerity agenda being imposed on the country by the Republicans and Obama’s conservative wing of the Democratic Party, we have a right to ask for an analysis of how things have gone in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya before we take the plunge into Syria, potentially the most devastating of all. I would love that analysis to be in the form of war crimes trials for Bush, Cheney, McCain, and their cronies. But that’s not going to happen. So why not just look throw one of hundreds of tiny little windows into what have happened over in the Middle East since someone seems to have given the Likud the keys to the family car. At the NY Times< this week, Matthew Rosenberg took a look at the role of bribery in our Afghan “strategy.” Not a very noble endeavor, but one that goes back to ancient times, the CIA has been doling out tens of millions of dollars to our crooked Afghan “allies.”

Former and current advisers of the Afghan leader have said the C.I.A. cash deliveries have totaled tens of millions of dollars over the past decade and have been used to pay off warlords, lawmakers and others whose support the Afghan leader depends upon.

The payments are not universally supported in the United States government. American diplomats and soldiers expressed dismay on Monday about the C.I.A.’s cash deliveries, which some said fueled corruption. They spoke privately because the C.I.A. effort is classified.

Others were not so restrained. “We’ve all suspected it,” said Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and a critic of the war effort in Afghanistan. “But for President Karzai to admit it out loud brings us into a bizarro world.”

…The C.I.A. money continues to flow, Mr. Karzai said Monday. “Yes, the office of national security has been receiving support from the United States for the past 10 years,” he told reporters in response to a question. “Not a big amount. A small amount, which has been used for various purposes.” He said the money was paid monthly.

Afghan officials who described the payments before Monday’s comments from Mr. Karzai said the cash from the C.I.A. was basically used as a slush fund, similarly to the way the Iranian money was. Some went to pay supporters; some went to cover other expenses that officials would prefer to keep off the books, like secret diplomatic trips, officials have said.

…The C.I.A. payments open a window to an element of the war that has often gone unnoticed: the agency’s use of cash to clandestinely buy the loyalty of Afghans. The agency paid powerful warlords to fight against the Taliban during the 2001 invasion. It then continued paying Afghans to keep battling the Taliban and help track down the remnants of Al Qaeda. Mr. Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali, who was assassinated in 2011, was among those paid by the agency, for instance.

But the cash deliveries to Mr. Karzai’s office are of a different magnitude with a far wider impact, helping the palace finance the vast patronage networks that Mr. Karzai has used to build his power base. The payments appear to run directly counter to American efforts to clean up endemic corruption and encourage the Afghan government to be more responsive to the needs of its constituents.

“I thought we were trying to clean up waste, fraud and abuse in Afghanistan,” said Mr. Chaffetz, whose House subcommittee has investigated corruption in the country. “We have no credibility on this issue when we’re complicit ourselves. I’m sure it was more than a few hundred dollars.”

This is part of the Afghanistan way of life in a way that few Americans who haven’t spent time there will ever fathom. We shouldn’t be there– not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq… and certainly not in Syria. I thought Obama’s legacy would just be how he opened the door to killing Social Security. It looks like it may also be starting a war of choice in Syria as well. Will anyone be able to make a case that there’s still a discernible difference between the Democrats and the Republicans after that?

Saturday we looked at the other nightmare inherent in drone warfare: so-called collateral damage or, less elegantly, technologically indiscriminately slaughtering people’s children and other innocent family members. And so, it turns out, did the L.A. Times in an OpEd by Doyle McManus asking if we’re creating more enemies than we’re killing. He sees the drone policy problem from a perspective more similar– though not identical– to my own:

[P]rotecting the rights of U.S. citizens in Al Qaeda is only part of what is at stake; those cases are unusual. In the long run, a more important question may be whether the drone strikes, which have killed more than 3,000 people, are creating more enemies for the United States than they are eliminating.

Scholars who have studied the political effects of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen have argued that even well-targeted raids often claim innocent victims, and the result is a backlash against the U.S. Likewise, Hayden and retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, have warned that too many drone attacks– in Pakistan, for example, where the CIA uses “signature strikes” against suspected militants without identifying them individually– can be a bad thing.

“What scares me about drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world,” McChrystal told the Reuters news agency last month. “The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes… is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.”

During a hearing that lasted more than three hours, only one senator asked about that critical issue– a senior Republican, Susan Collins of Maine.

“If you looked at a map back in 2001, you would see that Al Qaeda was mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and if you look at a map today, you would see Al Qaeda in all sorts of countries,” Collins said. “If the cancer of Al Qaeda is metastasizing, do we need a new treatment?”

Brennan agreed that the possibility of a backlash against drone strikes was “something we have to be very mindful of,” and that counter-terrorism strategy cannot depend solely on missile strikes. But he insisted that the critics are wrong and that populations terrorized by Al Qaeda “have welcomed the work that the U.S. government has done.”

Congress hasn’t shown much appetite for regulating the U.S. war against terrorism until now. That’s partly because there’s been little public pressure to do so; an ABC News-Washington Post Poll last year found that a whopping 79% of Americans approved of drone strikes, including against U.S. citizens.

The intelligence committees have monitored the drone war and concluded that it’s being conducted with care– although, as Feinstein notes, the evidence has been shrouded in secrecy.

But Collins shined a light on a question that can be debated in public: Are drone strikes effective in the long run, or are they creating more enemies than they kill? That’s a worthy target for Senate and House committees to go after.

The only bone I have to pick with the OpEd is that it doesn’t even bother mentioning the glaring and inherent immorality of murdering thousands of innocent civilians. And to me that’s the number one issue. Call me old fashioned. Call Bill Moyers that too:

This week, the New York Times published a chilling account of how indiscriminate killing remains bad policy even today. This time, it’s done not by young G.I.’s in the field but by anonymous puppeteers guiding drones by remote control against targets thousands of miles away, often killing the innocent and driving their enraged families and friends straight into the arms of the very terrorists we’re trying to eradicate.

The Times told of a Muslim cleric in Yemen named Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, standing in a village mosque denouncing Al Qaeda. It was a brave thing to do– a respected tribal figure, arguing against terrorism. But two days later, when he and a police officer cousin agreed to meet with three Al Qaeda members to continue the argument, all five men– friend and foe– were incinerated by an American drone attack.

The killings infuriated the village and prompted rumors of an upwelling of support in the town for Al Qaeda, because, the Times reported, “such a move is seen as the only way to retaliate against the United States.” Our blind faith in technology combined with a sense of infallible righteousness continues unabated. It brought us to grief in Vietnam and Iraq and may do so again with President Obama’s cold-blooded use of drones and his seeming indifference to so-called “collateral damage,” otherwise known as innocent bystanders. By the standards of slaughter in Vietnam the deaths by drone are hardly a blip on the consciousness of official Washington.

But we have to wonder if each one– a young boy gathering wood at dawn, unsuspecting of his imminent annihilation, the student picking up the wrong hitchhikers, that tribal elder standing up against fanatics– doesn’t give rise to second thoughts by those judges who prematurely handed our president the Nobel Prize for Peace. Better they had kept it on the shelf in hopeful waiting, untarnished.

That said, I’m happy to see that Dianne Feinstein wants to do something– unlike Republican House committee chairs Mike Rogers and, worse, Buck McKeon, who just want to sit around collecting legalistic bribes from drone manufacturers. Feinstein and some of her colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee are mulling the idea of establishing new FISA-like courts to oversee the use of armed drone strikes against suspected terror targets. It doesn’t solve the most profound problems of U.S. drone policy, but it scratches the surface… a little.

The effort to open the armed drone program to a  FISA-like court came after the unexpected release of a previously confidential Department of Justice white paper justifying U.S. drone operations– even if those strikes target American citizens.

If approved, the FISA-like authority for drone operations would allow lawmakers to directly address some of the perceived problems with the program, without dealing with the issues of classification surrounding the program.

“Right now it is very hard [to oversee] because it is regarded as a covert activity, so when you see something that is wrong and you ask to be able to address it, you are told no,” due the program being steeped in secrecy.

“We know it exists and I think this [program] has gone as far as it can go, as a covert activity, and I think we really need to address it,” Feinstein said.

…[W]ithin that process, there is an “absence of knowing who is responsible for [those] decisions” inside the White House and intelligence community, she added.

A FISA-like court process could go a long way to clearing up that ambiguity that exists within the administration’s system of checks and balances in the drone strike program.

“I think we need to look at this whole process and try to find a way to make it transparent and verifiable,” she said.

A sleazy political operative like Debbie Wasserman Schultz may claim she never heard of Obama’s “kill list”– after all, she intends on being Speaker one day– but everyone else in America has by now. It’s not that anyone can not care about extrajudicial executions of probable terrorists who have U.S. citizenship. We do– and I suspect we’ll care even more once we wind up with a President Rubio, President Ryan or President Huckabee. You think it’s a nightmare under Obama– it is– just imagine if someone without even a shred of a conscience has that kind of power backed up by the “legal” precedent being set now by a Congress too bloated with Military-Industrial Complex bribes to do their job and prevent this kind of grotesque abuse of authority.

Karzai was in Washington last week and suddenly there was all this talk about how U.S. troops, despite his panic, would be leaving Afghanistan sooner rather than later– and perhaps leaving no troops behind to prop up Karzai’s weak government which isn’t seen as legitimate by wide swathes of the population. In fact, Karzai is from the same sub-tribe as Shah Shuja, who was restored, briefly, to the throne by the British in the First Afghan War (1838-’42) and of whom Dost Muhammad told his people, “The Shah is now a servant of the Kafir infidels.” When the British left Afghanistan, Shuja, widely viewed as their puppet and, like Karzai without credibility among the dominant Pashtuns, was assassinated.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and his US counterpart Barack Obama have agreed to speed up the withdrawal of US combat troops as well as trade security responsibility from NATO to Afghan forces this spring.

After a long and deadly war, Obama announced plans to move US combat troops into an advisory role – slightly ahead of schedule– and also said any agreement on troop withdrawals must include an immunity agreement in which US soldiers are not subjected to Afghan law.

The president said the path of the US military remains clear and the war is moving toward a “responsible end” in 2014.

But the exact date, as well as how many troops are to remain, is still unclear.

U.S. policy is Afghanistan is not just a complete and costly failure, it no longer has any basis of support among Americans– neither on the left nor even on the right. Other than the Military Industrial Complex, which has profited so handsomely from it– and the Members of Congress in their pockets like McCain, Lindsay Graham, Miss McConnell, and Buck McKeon (who have all also profited handsomely)– everyone in America wants the U.S. to get out– and get out sooner rather than later. McConnell just got back from a quickie over there and says we need to keep 10,000 troops there after the 2014 pull-out. Here’s Rachel Maddow’s report on Obama’s announcement of the ending of U.S. involvement:

Her analysis (and Steve Clemons’)– the successful attainment of the benchmarks is pure, unadulterated bullshit– is spot on. But, getting out of that hellhole is a significant development and the completely predictable failure in Afghanistan is long overdue to end.

Recent “reports” from the war front have been of two kinds. Some official or analytical in nature and heavily circulated in Washington portray a war going terribly well. On the other hand, hard news from the ground tell a story of US fatigue, backtracking and tactical withdrawals or redeployments which do not bode well for defeating the Taliban or forcing them to the negotiations’ table.

  For example, while the US military’s decision to withdraw from the Pech valley was justified on tactical need to redeploy troops for the task of “protecting the population”, keen observers saw it as a humiliating retreat from what the Pentagon previously called a very strategic position and sacrificed some hundred soldiers defending it.

Likewise, strategic analysts close to the administration speak triumphantly of US surge and hi-tech firepower inflicting terrible cost on the Taliban, killing many insurgents and driving many more from their sanctuaries.

But news from the war front show the Taliban unrelenting, mounting counterattacks and escalating the war especially in areas where the US has “surged” its troops. And while the majority of the 400 Afghan districts are “calmer”, they remain mostly out of Kabul’s control.

Those with relatively long memories recall the then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s claims that most of Afghanistan was secure in early 2003 and that American forces had changed their strategy from major combat operations to stabilisation and reconstruction project.

But the Taliban continued to carry daily attacks on government buildings, US positions and international organisations. Two years later, the US was to suffer the worst and deadliest year since the war began.

Today’s war pundits are in the same state of denial. For all practical purpose, Washington has given up on its counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy devised under McChrystal and Petreaus.

Instead, it is pursuing a heavy handed and terribly destructive crackdown that includes special operations, assassinations, mass demolitions, air and night raids etc that have led to anything but winning the country, let alone its hearts and minds.

The killing of nine Afghan children last week– all under the age of 12– by US attack helicopters has once again put the spotlight on the US military’s new aggressive methods.

The results are so devastating for the conduct of the war and to Washington’s clients, that President Karzai not only distanced himself from the US methods, but also publicly rejected Washington’s apology for the killings.

Nor is the recruitment and training of the Afghan forces going well. Indeed, many seem to give up on the idea that Afghan security forces could take matters into their hands if the US withdraws in the foreseeable future.

Worse, US strategic co-operation with Pakistan – the central pillar of Obama’s PakAf strategy– has cooled after the arrest of a CIA contractor for the killing of two Pakistanis even though he presumably enjoys diplomatic immunity.

Reportedly, it has also led to a “breakdown” in co-ordination between the two countries intelligence agencies, the CIA and the ISI.

  But the incident is merely a symptom of a bigger problem between the two countries. A reluctant partner, the Pakistani establishment and its military are unhappy with US strategy which they reckon could destabilise their country and strengthen Afghanistan and India at their expense.

That has not deterred Washington from offering ideas and money to repair the damage. However, it has become clear that unlike in recent years, future improvement in their bilateral relations will most probably come as a result of the US edging closer to Pakistan’s position, not the opposite.

All of which makes one wonder why certain Washington circles are rushing to advance the “success story.”

…The mere fact that the world’s mightiest superpower cannot win over the poorly armed Taliban after a long decade of fighting, means it has already failed strategically, regardless of the final outcome.

The escalation of violence and wasting billions more cannot change that. It is history. The quicker the Obama administration recognises its misfortunes, minimises its losses and convenes a regional conference over the future of Afghanistan under UN auspices, the easier it will be to evacuate without humiliation.

Whether the US eventually loses the war and declares victory; negotiates a settlement and withdraw its troops, remains to be seen. What is incontestable is that when you fight the week for too long, you also become weak.

All of which explains the rather blunt comments made in a speech at the end of February, by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates when he said “… any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”

Amen.

In the video below, Maddow also explains the issue of immunity for American troops in Afghanistan. No one wants U.S. troops in Afghanistan more than Karzai. If they go, he has to as well– either that or end up like Shah Shuja, dead. Karzai said he would ask the Afghan people about the immunity issue. But most Afghans want the U.S. troops out and consider immunity out of the question. Although that isn’t the way Karzai tells it. He told Christiane Amanpour on CNN that “I can tell you with relatively good confidence that they will say ‘alright, let’s do it. And I’m sure that they will understand.”

At the press conference, President Obama said that he had stressed to Karzai that “the United States already has arrangements like this with countries all around the world, and nowhere does the U.S. have any kind of security agreement with a country without immunity for our troops.”

In the final stages of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, President Obama was unable to obtain a similar agreement, propelling him to withdraw all U.S. forces from that country in December 2011.

Karzai rejected the notion that has been floated that the U.S. might leave “zero troops” in Afghanistan after the pullout is completed at the end of 2014. 

He told Amanpour that Afghans need some type of U.S. presence for “broader security and stability” after the withdrawal. For that reason, Karzai believes Afghans will have to grant the U.S. troops left there immunity.

“The United States will need to have a limited number of forces in Afghanistan,” he said, but was unwilling to give an exact number. “That’s not for us to decide. It is for the United States to decide what number of troops they will be keeping in Afghanistan and what strength of equipment those troops will have.”

The American people don’t want it and neither do most of Afghanistan’s people. When Obama says “unless there was some kind of immunity, it would not be possible for the U.S. to keep troops in Afghanistan after 2014,: that’s his way out– just like it was in Iraq. This morning Karzai announced the issue of immunity for U.S. troops in Afghanistan would be made by the end of the year. “The issue of immunity is under discussion (and) it is going to take eight to nine months before we reach agreement,” he told a news conference back in Kabul. He says it will require acquiescence from a Loya Jirga, a grand council. My guess is that most Afghans outside Karzai’s immediate circle would rather see Karzai and his clique dead than agree to immunity for foreign troops.