Time to "Pack the Old Kit Bag"

Afghan President Karzai has made it perfectly clear: the American "occupiers" are not wanted in Afghanistan.  Our President should keep that foremost in his mind as he prepares to announce the first installment of US troop withdrawals from the land where empires go to die.  Now that the figurehead of jihadist terror rests with the fishes and negotiations are underway with the Taliban, there is nothing else to accomplish in Afghanistan.  The goal of moulding a modern democracy from the clay of a Muslim tribal refuge was never realistic or achievable regardless of what our careerist military bureaucrats say.  No general wants a blot on his copy book.  Americans are tired of the longest war in a far away place which has no connection to their security other than as a hideaway for terrorists numbering less than several hundred, and pressure in Congress to end the war sooner is mounting.  As Commander in Chief, the President needs to make it clear to his generals that the time for making Afghans responsible for their future has finally come.  $120 billion a year, not to mention the lives lost, to build a nation the Afghan tribesmen do not want is an ethnocentric extravagance the US can no longer afford.