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The ballpark figure of this first reduction is said to be on the order of 30,000 U.S. troops — mirroring the 2009 surge — over the next 12-18 months. This would leave some 70,000 U.S. troops, plus allied forces, in the country.

Far more interesting are the rumors — coming from STRATFOR sources, among many others — suggesting that the impending White House announcement will spell out not only the anticipated reduction, but a restatement of the strategy and objectives of the war effort

a deep-seated thirst for vengeance led the United States to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 and to declare a “global war on terrorism.”

In spite of the sense of justice and closure the killing of bin Laden brings, however, his death will likely have very little practical impact on the jihadist movement.

the phenomenon of jihadism is far wider than just the al Qaeda core leadership of bin Laden and his closest followers.

Just 15 or 20 years ago, headlines like these were unimaginable. But marijuana legalization didn't just win in Washington and Coloardo, it won big.

In Colorado, it outpolled President Barack Obama. In Washington, Obama beat pot by less than half a percentage point. Medical marijuana also won in Massachusetts, and nearly won in Arkansas. (Legalization of pot lost in Oregon, but drug law reformers contend that was due to a poorly written ballot initiative that would basically have made the state a vendor.)

But it wasn't just pot. In California, voters reined in the state's infamous "Three Strikes and You're Out" law, passing a measure that now requires the third offense to be a serious or violent felony before the automatic life sentence kicks in. The results don't negate the law, but they do take some of the teeth out of it. And the margin -- the reform passed by more than a 2-to-1 margin -- has significant symbolic value. Three Strikes was arguably the most high-profile and highly touted of the get-tough-on-crime policies of the 1980s and 1990s. It epitomized the slogan-based approach to criminal justice policy that politicians tended to take during the prison boom.

People are very interested in partisan politics. Political partisans are very interested in the presidency. The president is an important player in federal budget debates. And thus people are very interested in questions about federal government spending "under Obama." But the national economy doesn't care about why money gets spent or which level of government spends it.

The first is the massive, unprecedented, destructive and radical use of a non-filibuster filibuster to make the Senate unable to pass anything significant without 60 votes, rather than 51 (or 50 with the veep). This is not conservative. It's a blatant attack on tradition in defense of pure partisanship.

the threat of war has not dissolved. It has, however, been pushed off beyond this round of negotiations. 

There is no chance of an attack on chemical weapons stockpiles. Therefore, the attack, if any, will be on command and control and political targets

The Gipper wasn't the warhound his conservative followers would have you think.

These days, virtually every time someone on the American right bashes President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle to Ronald Reagan.

He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totaled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war -- the 1986 bombing of Libya -- was even briefer.

Focus on all the possibilities out there. In your same age range, if possible.

Gen X'ers should be ecstatic. We aren't home alone anymore. We finally have a president in the White House who came of age wanting his MTV.

Obama's mother was a Baby Boomer, which clearly makes him a member of the next generation.

That means it is entirely possible that a slew of miscalculations are being made today. One of the most widespread misconceptions about the U.S. political system is that a president who is weak at home is by default weak abroad. This is a belief primarily promulgated by Americans themselves. After all, if one cannot get behind one’s leader, what business does that leader have engaging in global affairs? But in reality, a president who is weak at home often wields remarkable power abroad. The U.S. Constitution forces the American president to share domestic power with Congress, so a split government leads to domestic policy gridlock. However, the Constitution also expressly reserves all foreign policy — particularly military policy — for the presidency. In fact, a weak president often has no options before him except foreign policy. This is something that the rest of the world repeatedly has failed to grasp. Domestically weakened American presidents have often done more than engage in foreign policy: They have overturned entire international orders. Former U.S. President George W. Bush defied expectations after his 2006 midterm electoral defeat and launched the surge in Iraq, utterly changing the calculus of that war. Clinton launched the Kosovo War, which undid what remained of the Cold War security architecture. Most famously, John Kennedy, whom the Soviets had written off as a weak and naive dilettante who had surrounded himself with incompetent advisers (sound familiar?), gave the Russians their biggest Cold War diplomatic defeat in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States might be distracted and its president domestically weakened, and undoubtedly most of the world will assume that they know what this means. But history tells a very different story, and this president — like his predecessors — is not done just yet.

See what happens when you wallow in hollow disappointment, trudging all over your liberal arts campus and refusing to vote in a rather important mid-term election, all because your pet issues and nubile ego weren't immediately serviced by a mesmerizing guy named Barack Obama just after he sucked you into his web of fuzzyhappy promises a mere two years ago, back when you were knee-high to a shiny liberal ideology?

Did you see the polls and studies that said that most fresh-faced, Obama-swooning Dems like you are now refusing to support our beloved Nazi Muslim president because he didn't wish-fulfill your every whim in a week? That he was, in fact, not quite the instant-gratification SuperJesus of your (or rather, our) dreams?

The Obama administration sure as hell could've done more to keep young activists inspired and involved. It's an opportunity squandered, no question. Then again, dude was sorta busy unburying the entire nation, you know? And the twitchy Democratic party has never been known for its savvy cohesion. Maybe you can give him/them a break? Whoops, too late.

In other words, the White House blamed Democrats' 2010 defeat on the loss of independents, and to win them back, it will try to slow the growth of government, encourage a bipartisan spirit in Washington, and reform the government process by eliminating things like earmarks.

How to explain this surprising if well-concealed comity? Some is due to the inevitable transformation that every party goes through when it moves from the opposition to the White House. Being in power tends to breed responsibility, just as being out of power breeds irresponsibility. Many Republicans during the Clinton years turned toward quasi-isolationism and opposed Clinton's policies -- even his hawkish policies -- simply because they hated Clinton. Many Democrats  showed great solidarity with Bush after September 11, 2001 -- a bipartisan moment that Bush helped squander. But they soon came to oppose almost everything Bush did, even policies traditionally associated with the Democratic Party, such as democracy promotion and nation-building, and even when, as in the case of the surge in Iraq, the most likely beneficiary of success would be a Democratic president.

The irony is that in some ways Obama has been fighting the war on terror at least as vigorously as his predecessor. He escalated the war in Afghanistan. He greatly increased drone attacks on suspected terrorists in Pakistan. Indeed, the Obama administration carried out more drone strikes in its first year than the Bush administration carried out in the previous five years combined, producing a record number of enemy casualties. Although the Obama administration may be more generous in providing legal defense to captured terrorists than the Bush administration, it also makes a greater effort to assassinate them, thus obviating the need for trials. 

The most absurd of the "un-Bush" policies of this administration has been its deliberate turn away from helping democrats against autocracies abroad.

As this major domestic issue moves out of the spotlight, it will free up some time for Obama to address other items, such as foreign policy. Several issues will require his presidential attention

The United States sees a glaring trade imbalance with the Chinese as the biggest roadblock standing in the way of more rapid economic growth, while Beijing views Obama’s new export initiative with caution.

Iran: The country that had the most potential to draw the United States into yet another Middle East war during Obama’s first year in office is happy to watch from the sidelines as Israel struggles on the Iranian and Palestinian fronts vis-a-vis the United States.

Some critics have alleged that the U.S. administration passed up a golden opportunity for peace in a fit of pique at diplomatic interlopers, or that Iran had made painful concessions to fellow emerging nations that it would not make to the West.

"rhythmic diplomacy," which sounds like jazzercise but in fact, as he put it, "implies active involvement in all international organizations and on all issues of global and international importance."

Zoom out a little. Think of this latest skirmish, that ended tonight, as part of an endgame to a thirty years' fiscal war in American politics. Reagan began it, by betting that slashing taxes would spur growth; he was right and wrong. Growth really did happen in the 1980s; but he bequeathed a debt that is with us today, and that he tried only fitfully to fix on his watch. The early 1990s saw the country draw down that deficit, by continuing Reagan's tax hikes under Bush I and then Clinton, and thanks to a peace dividend. Clinton's eventual surplus was, alas, more mirage than reality, for it hadn't solved the long-term entitlement problem or the healthcare cost problem, and was inflated by the tech bubble. Bush II comes in and wreaks havoc. He doubles down on Reagan on taxes and declares that deficits don't matter, while adding one major new entitlement, two massively expensive wars and throws in a financial collapse as a goodbye present. The result of all this was a recession that helped metastasize the debt even further. This was what Obama inherited.

What then? I think the Grand Bargain is the final step

Afghanistan, a landlocked country in the heart of Central Asia, is one of the most isolated places on Earth. This isolation has posed huge logistical challenges for the United States. Hundreds of shipping containers and fuel trucks must enter the country every day from Pakistan and from the north to sustain the nearly 150,000 U.S. and allied forces stationed in Afghanistan, about half the total number of Afghan security forces. Supplying a single gallon of gasoline in Afghanistan reportedly costs the U.S. military an average of $400, while sustaining a single U.S. soldier runs around $1 million a year (by contrast, sustaining an Afghan soldier costs about $12,000 a year).

An 11,500-foot all-weather concrete and asphalt runway and an air traffic control tower were completed this February at Camp Leatherneck and Camp Bastion in Helmand province. Another more than 9,000-foot runway was finished at Shindand Air Field in Herat province last December.

short of a hasty and rapid withdrawal reminiscent of the chaotic American exit from Saigon in 1975 (which no one currently foresees in Afghanistan), the logistical challenge of withdrawing from Afghanistan — at whatever pace — is perhaps even more daunting than the drawdown in Iraq. The complexity of having nearly 50 allies with troops in country will complicate this process.

Any withdrawal from Afghanistan, particularly an accelerated one, will leave a power vacuum in Afghanistan that the Kabul government will not be able to fill.

There is a prior definition of success that shaped the Bush administration’s approach to Afghanistan in its early phases. The goal here was the disruption of al Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan and the prevention of further attacks on the United States from Afghanistan.

It was more modest and, in many ways, it was achieved in 2001-2002. Its defect, of course, was that the disruption of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, while useful, did not address the evolution of al Qaeda in other countries.

Despite America’s best efforts to construct stronger ties with China, relations in-between both countries have been repeatedly buffeted by a series of tensions and misunderstandings. Many of these frictions appear to have resulted from a more assertive Chinese posture in the South China Sea.

When attempting to explain this upsurge in Chinese pugnacity, analysts have pointed to the rising power's selective interpretation of the law of the sea and growing unwillingness to compromise over what it calls its “blue national soil”, particularly when confronted with an increasingly intransigent domestic populace.

Others have pointed to the more immediately tangible benefits to be derived from the presence of numerous offshore oil and gas deposits within contested waters.

But the "legal gray zone" itself is alarming enough—highlighting the lack of transparency surrounding the administration's drone program—as are the discrepancies in total numbers killed. It's between 2,537 and 3,581 (including 411 to 884 civilians) killed since 2004, if you want to go with the BIJ. Or it's between 1,965 and 3,295 people since 2004 (and 261 to 305 civilians), if you want to believe the Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative at the New America Foundation. Or perhaps it's 2,651 since 2006 (including 153 civilians), according to Long War Journal. (The NAF and Long War Journal base estimates on press reports. BIJ also includes deaths reported to the US or Pakistani governments, military and intelligence officials, and other academic sources.)