Washington, Kabul Kiss & Make Up. US Troops Stay in Afghanistan Until 2024.

Hamid Karzai talked tough about getting Western forces out of Afghanistan immediately if not sooner.   Afghanistan, however, is under new management that means America's longest war ever will be extended for another decade.

Barack Obama, elected president in 2008 on a wave of anti-war sentiment, will pass off both the Afghanistan war and his new war in Iraq and Syria to his successor.  In 2010, his vice president, Joe Biden, publicly vowed the US would be "totally out" of Afghanistan "come hell or high water, by 2014." 

In fairness to Joe, he said "hell or high water."  He didn't say ISIS.  What's that word I'm looking for?  Oh yes, "quagmire."

Biden Joins Bridge Crossing Marchers in Selma

The rightwing stooges who control the U.S. Supreme Court might be willing to imagine away the reality of racial voter suppression in 2013 America but vice president Joe Biden took shoe leather to their warped fantasy yesterday in Selma, Alabama.

US Vice-President Joe Biden and black leaders commemorating a famous civil rights march on Sunday said efforts to diminish the impact of African-Americans' votes had not stopped in the years since the 1965 Voting Rights Act added millions to southern US voter rolls.

More than 5000 people followed Mr Biden and Georgia Congressman John Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma's annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee. The event commemorates the ''Bloody Sunday'' beating of voting rights marchers - including a young Mr Lewis - by state troopers as they began a march to Montgomery in March 1965. The march prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which struck down impediments to voting by African-Americans and ended all-white rule in the South.

Mr Biden, the first vice-president to take part in the annual re-enactment, said nothing shaped his consciousness more than watching TV footage of the beatings. ''We saw in stark relief the rank hatred, discrimination and violence that still existed in large parts of the nation,'' he said.

Mr Biden said marchers ''broke the back of the forces of evil'', but that challenges to voting rights continued, with restrictions on early voting and voter registration drives, voter ID laws where no voter fraud has been shown.

Jesse Jackson said Sunday's march had a sense of urgency because the Supreme Court heard a request last week by a mostly white Alabama county to strike down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act.

''We've had the right to vote 48 years, but they've never stopping trying to diminish the impact of the votes,'' Mr Jackson said.
Referring to the act, the Reverend Al Sharpton said: ''We are not here for a commemoration. We are here for a continuation.''

Palin Slams Obamas as Unpatriotic and Racist

Unbelievable.  The Weasel of Wassila, Sarah Palin, is about to release a new book in which she slams Barack and Michelle Obama.   From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Sarah Palin has accused Barack and Michelle Obama of being unpatriotic and has suggested they are racist.
 
In leaked extracts of her new book, America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate argues that the first black US president is among those who regarded the Tea Party movement as racially prejudiced and who thinks ''America is a fundamentally unjust and unequal country''.

As proof, she quoted a 2008 campaign speech in which Mrs Obama said ''for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country''. Mrs Palin went on: ''I guess this shouldn't surprise us, since both of them spent almost two decades in the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church listening to his rants against America and white people.''

Mrs Palin's second book is regarded as a launch pad for a bid for the 2012 Republican nomination, which she admitted this week she was ''seriously considering''.

The book criticises talent show contestants and the ''cult of self-esteem'', which she blames partly on Mr Obama: ''No one they have encountered in their lives - from their parents to their teachers to their president - wanted them to feel bad by hearing the truth. So they grew up convinced that they could become big pop stars like Michael Jackson.''

Mrs Palin has begun a reality show in which she talks about her family life and home state of Alaska.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden was asked what he thought of Palin's claim that she could defeat Barack Obama:

Back on Track

Barack Obama has a problem. His White House is leaking like a sieve. The upside to it is that it appears the cowboy days of Shrub Bush are history and the executive branch is back to rational decision-making.

The New York Times identified no less than half a dozen officials who spoke to the paper about Obama's decision on Afghanistan. Naturally they all spoke on condition of anonymity.

The debate over the past few weeks offered a glimpse into how Mr. Obama makes decisions. In this case, he chose a compromise between his political and military advisers that some critics say includes some strategic holes, such as a reliance on the same sort of vague guidelines that proved difficult to carry out in Iraq. It also offers insight into the role of Mr. Biden and other members of a foreign policy team that includes many powerful figures vying for Mr. Obama’s attention.

In the end the plan is a compromise that reflected all of the strains of the discussion among his advisers, one that is markedly different, though perhaps no less difficult, from the goals his predecessor set for the region. In speaking of Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush spoke of lofty goals that included building nations that could stand as models of democracy in the Muslim world.

...During the debate, the senior administration officials said, Mr. Biden sought to put strict parameters on the size of the additional force deployed to Afghanistan and to ensure there was a specific mission for them. Mr. Biden also cast the debate in terms of what was achievable in Mr. Obama’s first term, administration officials said.

Mr. Biden, White House officials said, was heavily influenced by the trip he took to Afghanistan and Pakistan just before the inauguration in January. He observed to Mr. Obama that if you asked 10 people on the ground what American objectives were, he would get 10 different answers. That observation, aides said, carried weight with Mr. Obama and helped to lead to his decision to narrow the American goal in Afghanistan.

Contrast this with former State Secretary Colin Powell's revelation that he only learned about Bush's decision to invade Iraq after it had already been taken. And look how well that turned out.

I'm still curious whether the Times' sources were really telling tales out of school or was it intended they would get the message out?