in Kabul to protect itself independently of foreign troops

in Kabul to protect itself independently of foreign troops is hardly likely to be the last word, pleasing as the spectacle may be for presidential campaign purposes. The key — but by no means the only — conversation shaping Afghanistan s future will be the one conducted on the battlefield, and at the negotiating table, between the U.S., its Afghan interlocutors and the Taliban. That point seemed to be underscored by a Taliban car bomb attack near U.S. bases in Kabul just hours after Obama s departure, which served as a ford km tool counterpoint to the President s insistence in his speech that the insurgents momentum has been broken. Sure, the U.S. has made important tactical gains against the Taliban in designated operational areas in southwestern Afghanistan, but tactical gains in an expeditionary counterinsurgency war tend to be just that; the insurgents know that, as Henry Kissinger famously put it, guerrilla armies win by not losing. They know that the civilian population has little faith in Western forces or in the government those forces protect, and they know the U.S. and its allies are seeking an expeditious exit from Afghanistan. The brutal truth of the Afghanistan equation is that time is still fiat km tool on the side of the Taliban. The U.S. plans to drawn down troop levels from the current 90,000 to less than 20,000 by the end of 2014, while helping Afghan security forces surge to an anticipated 352,000 troops this year. The new agreements seemed to signal a ten-year commitment to maintain an unspecified number of troops for training, intelligence and logistics purposes, and to conduct operations against al-Qaeda. (More importantly, the U.S., as well as other NATO countries, will commit later this month to a decade-long financial package to the government in Kabul worth over $4 billion a year, a sum some say Karzai considers insufficient.) We will not build permanent bases in this country, nor will we be patrolling in cities and mountains, Obama said. That will be the job of the Afghan people. But so narrow is the