Robert Gates says the US is never leaving Afghanistan

Before we even start, let's look at Obama appointee and close confidante Rahm Emanuel

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel privately refers to the war as "political flypaper" and the veteran of sharp-elbowed Chicago politics once got so frustrated with Karzai that he considered sending him "the equivalent of a dead fish with an imperial wrapping," writes Woodward. Emanuel's threat -- "Tell him we're going to put our own governors in if we have to" -- was ignored by the president during a meeting with military brass.

This is the United States. This is what it costs to keep the Middle East safe for Israel and the string of pro-US, relatively pro-Zionist colonial holdings the US maintains in the region on Israel's behalf.

But the Obama administration as a typical 19th century colonialist regime is just an open secret. The new information we get from the Huffington Post recently is that the administration is beginning to test openly expressing its desire to hold a permanent presence in Afghanistan.

During a dinner hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Afghan President Hamid Karzai in May, Gates reminded the group that he still feels guilty for his role in the first President Bush's decision to pull out of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, according to Bob Woodward's new book, "Obama's Wars." And to express his commitment to not letting down the country again, he emphasized:

"We're not leaving Afghanistan prematurely," Gates finally said. "In fact, we're not ever leaving at all."

Woodward notes that the group was shocked by the blunt comment: "At least one stunned participant put down his fork. Another wrote it down, verbatim, in his notes."

The definitive statement seems to clash with President Obama's assertion that he does not want to leave the war to his successor. Though he has emphasized that the U.S. will stay in Afghanistan "until the job is done," he wants almost all the US troops out before the end of his first term in January 2013, leaving in place a small contingency force.

A reminder of why the US is in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not the only or most lawless place in the world. Afghanistan is the an essentially lawless place that is also Muslim, at a time when the US has a single fundamental dispute with most Muslims in the world which is over the legitimacy of Israel as a politically Jewish state.

Without that dispute, Afghanistan would not pose a threat as a staging ground for attacks, like 9/11, on US interests including the US mainland. Neither would anyone else in the Muslim world. There'd be no necessity or even rationale for a US occupation of Afghanistan (or Iraq) for one day, much less forever.

Obama had never even publicly said there would be a permanent "small contingency force" in Afghanistan. The US acts as if it hopes to accomplish permanent military presences in both Iraq and Afghanistan that it can use as leverage over these Muslim countries despite its claims of the opposite.

It is not clear how much the US is willing to pay for these presences, but the US, using the Woodward book and to a smaller degree the Huffington Post as its mouthpiece, is now beginning to publicly state its intention to do so.