{"id":40034,"date":"2014-02-26T08:50:14","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T13:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=40034"},"modified":"2014-02-26T08:50:14","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T13:50:14","slug":"obama-threatens-to-take-ball-go-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=40034","title":{"rendered":"Obama threatens to take ball, go home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ex-PH2 sends us a link to the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.msn.com\/us\/obama-tells-pentagon-to-plan-for-afghan-pullout\">Associated Press<\/a> which reports that President Obama called the Taliban&#8217;s chief propagandist, Hamid Karzai, for the first time since last summer and threatened to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan if the nation doesn&#8217;t sign the agreement that the two parties had negotiated last year for a continued presence of Americans there;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;We will leave open the possibility of concluding a (security agreement) with Afghanistan later this year,&#8221; the White House said in a statement following the call. &#8220;However, the longer we go without a (deal), the more challenging it will be to plan and execute any U.S. mission.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Obama&#8217;s attempt to minimize Karzai&#8217;s importance to U.S. decision-making underscores how fractured the relationship between the two leaders has become. Tuesday&#8217;s phone call was the first direct contact between Obama and Karzai since last June. The Afghan leader has deeply irritated Washington with anti-American rhetoric, as well as with his decision this month to release 65 prisoners over the objections of U.S. officials.<\/p>\n<p>The White House insists it won&#8217;t keep any American troops in Afghanistan after December without a security agreement giving the military a legal basis for staying in the country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So, who is surprised that setting an arbitrary withdrawal date to force Afghanistan to take responsibility for their own security is causing all of these problems? I mean, it was Joe Bite Me&#8217;s idea, so why isn&#8217;t it working?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ex-PH2 sends us a link to the Associated Press which reports that President Obama called the &hellip; <a title=\"Obama threatens to take ball, go home\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=40034\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Obama threatens to take ball, go home<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}