Open thread for night owls: How long, really, will U.S. stay in Afghanistan?

Tom Engelhardt writes How Quickly Will the U.S. Leave Afghanistan?:

You undoubtedly know the phrase: the best laid plans of mice and men.  It couldn't be more apt when it comes to the American project in Afghanistan.  Washington's plans have indeed been carefully drawn up.  By the end of 2014, U.S. 'combat troops' are to be withdrawn, but left behind on the giant bases the Pentagon has built will be thousands of U.S. trainers and advisers, as well as special operations forces to go after al-Qaeda remnants (and other 'militants'), and undoubtedly the air power to back them all up.

Their job will officially be to continue to 'stand up' the humongous security force that no Afghan government in that thoroughly impoverished country will ever be able to pay for.  Thanks to a 10-year Strategic Partnership Agreement that President Obama flew to Kabul to seal with Afghan President Hamid Karzai as May began, there they are to remain until 2020 or beyond.

In other words, it being Afghanistan, we need a translator.  The American 'withdrawal' regularly mentioned in the media doesn't really mean 'withdrawal.'  On paper at least, for years to come the U.S. will partially occupy a country that has a history of loathing foreigners who won't leave (and making them pay for it). [...]

Right now, evidence on the ground -- in the form of dead American bodies piling up -- indicates that even the Afghans closest to us don't exactly second the Obama administration's plans for a 20-year occupation.  In fact, news from the deep-sixed war in that forgotten land, often considered the longest conflict in American history, has suddenly burst onto the front pages of our newspapers and to the top of the TV news.  And there's just one reason for that: despite the copious plans of the planet's last superpower, the poor, backward, illiterate, hapless, corrupt Afghans -- whose security forces, despite unending American financial support and mentoring, have never effectively 'stood up' -- made it happen.  They have been sending a stark message, written in blood, to Washington's planners.

A 15-year-old 'tea boy' at a U.S. base opened fire on Marine special forces trainers exercising at a gym, killing three of them and seriously wounding another; a 60- or 70-year-old farmer, who volunteered to become a member of a village security force, turned the first gun his American special forces trainers gave him at an 'inauguration ceremony' back on them, killing two; a police officer who, his father claims, joined the force four years earlier, invited Marine Special Operations advisers to a meal and gunned down three of them, wounding a fourth, before fleeing, perhaps to the Taliban. [...]

The message is certainly clear enough, however unprepared those in Washington and in the field are to hear it: forget our enemies; a rising number of those Afghans closest to us want us out in the worst way possible and their message on the subject has been horrifically blunt.  As NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski put it recently, among Americans in Afghanistan there is now 'a growing fear the armed Afghan soldier standing next to them may really be the enemy.'

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