that karzai shouldn t be doing so either. by august of that year, 2009, obama s first year in office, during a presidential election in afghanistan, polls showed karzai ahead. obama administration officials were struggling to explain how this he would find a way to keep dealing with karzai after he won that election. more than four years late, the u.s. is planning its own exit from afghanistan, 12 months from now, by the end of 2014, hamid karzai announced his plans to leave office, too. another afghan president will be elected next year. the big question for both sides before they both leave, is how many troops the u.s. will leave behind. the u.s. has offered to leave around 10,000 troops in afghanistan as a security force. karzai can t seem to make up his mind. first, he said that afghanistan s grand council of elders would have the final sign the security deal, but once they signed off on it last week, karzai himself still wouldn t sign. and a coalition air strike killed a 2-year-ol
signing. national security adviser susan rice says if karzai doesn t sign soon, they will have to plan for a future with no american troops in afghanistan, zero. a very recent precedent for leaving a country with no security forces left behind. it s what happened in iraq two years ago. the country has devolved into violence and chaos ever since. 12 years ago, the u.s. entered afghanistan with the goal of taking on the taliban. it was the first wave of what we would end up calling you the war on terrorism and long since surpassed very yacht nam as the long waste war in american history. what happens after a dozen years and countless blood and pressures loss, the u.s. ends up leaving afghanistan with the very same power vacuum it helped to control zblat what fills that vacuum? what are the security consequences for that? after all it has cost us, shouldn t we be asking ourselves why? well, here to talk about this at the table we still have rick hertz berg with the new yorker, robert geor