Obama, Karzai Agree On 10 years of Aid, New Definition of "Partnership"
Adding more fuel to the pearl-clutching GOP shock that a politician is using the things that happened while he was in office for political gain, President Barack Obama surfaced this afternoon in Afghanistan to announce what the Washington Post is calling "a strategic partnership agreement" with President Hamid Karzai.
Today, as you might have heard, is the anniversary of the death (execution?) of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs in 2011 in Pakistan. Obama quietly jetted out to the Bagram air base north of Kabul to meet with Karzai and sign a 10-year agreement describing how the U.S. will continue to provide assistance to the nation even though most NATO troops are scheduled to leave the country by 2014. CBS reports the U.S. will continue to provide aid, advisors and support as part of the agreement, which is amusingly being referred to by the administration as a "partnership." (Perhaps in exchange we'll get a discount on opium?)
President Obama is scheduled to give a speech at 7:30 p.m. EST, in which he's unlikely to give any significant details of the content of the agreement. We can probably expect Obama's version of a "Mission Accomplished" speech, even as the Pentagon reports today Afghanistan is a mixed bag of successes and problems.
For those interested in following the White House's doomed effort to keep the president's travels under wraps in the age of social media, Zeke Miller at BuzzFeed documents how the administration clamped down on media outlets who had gotten wind of the trip.
Update: Here's the video of the whole speech.
