The Charade In Chicago.

Is there anyone who believes anything the Obama White House says about Afghanistan anymore?

"Either the president isn’t leveling with us when he says we will pursue minimalist goals or he isn’t leveling with us when he signs a summit declaration that commits us to maximalist goals."

"If the US military failed at the height of the surge in rebuilding infrastructure through its provincial reconstruction teams, the idea that the opposite force will produce the same result – that the prospect of a withdrawal of US troops will force a weak state to become stronger – is just as fanciful."

"While President Obama and Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai posed for cameras and spoke warmly of their shared vision for the country after the U.S. departure, what they offered up was a kind of joint hallucination -- a better-functioning, more democratic, more stable Afghanistan that is patently impossible if it continues to be ruled by the weak and corrupt Karzai, if the country remains as fragmented as it is, if its neighbors continue to meddle in its affairs (as they will), if we deal in the Taliban as if somehow they were now changed men, if we turn our backs on the undoubtedly worsening plight of Afghan women, and if we ignore the fact that the single most successful U.S. agricultural development program in history was the restoration of Afghanistan's heroin industry."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is emphatic and unequivocal: no troops after 2014. Canadian soldiers did not fight and die in Afghanistan merely to provide an American presidential incumbent with whoppers to augment his campaign's talking points. Sorry, Mr. President, but no, that’s not what Canadian soldiers are for.

Playing whack-a-mole with the remnants of Osama bin Laden’s bedraggled jihadists is all the White House wants to stand from the former cause of a sovereign and democratic Afghan republic. Sorry, Mr. President, but the Democratic Party’s financiers are quite capable of paying for the liposuction and cosmetic surgery that has so disfigured your “Af-Pak” policy. That’s not what Canadian taxpayers are for.

One of the only important questions that remains:  "How many years after NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014 will it take before the government falls and Kabul is once again in the hands of the Taliban?"