Besides, how do you "end" a war by simply having one side say it's over, unless you actually do stop fighting and walk away? Certainly the invading side in a foreign war can call that war quits, but if the other side doesn't, and the invader stays on the battlefield -- which in Afghanistan is the whole county -- you haven't ended it at all. The other side will continue to hit you until you're gone.
In other words, clearly that force of 10,000 US troops, whatever they are called officially, will be in a state of war, because there is no way that the Taliban in Afghanistan will quietly allow them to be there training an army to fight them, without taking the battle to the "trainers."
So how then, can Obama, Biden and the generals be promising that the war will be ended in 2014?
The answer is that they are not calling what will be happening after 2014 a "war." They will be changing the definition of the word "war."
It is totally predictable that the unfortunate soldiers who are ordered over as part of that 10,000-member force of "trainers" after 2014 will be subjected to attacks by Taliban fighters, by suicide bombers, and by IED mines. Their bases will be hit by mortars and rockets. When they travel, their vehicles will be the targets of RPGs. They will also be subject to attack by members of the Afghan military whom they are ostensibly training, since the Taliban have already learned that infiltration of the country's army is a great way to get close to the American forces, the better to hit them when their guard is down or their backs are turned.
Inevitably, the US forces will be forced to fight back, and to take the offensive too. There will certainly continue to be US airstrikes, and we can be sure that armed attack drones will be widely employed also, guaranteeing the creation of plenty of new enemy forces sworn to punish and drive out the US.
None of this will, of course, be described as "war" by the US, or by the compliant corporate media in America.
There is a model for this kind of thing. America has been fighting a war in Colombia for years against the FARC, marxist rebels operating in the jungles of that country at the northern end of South America. Only this has never been described as a war in the US media or in reports from the Pentagon. The soldiers sent down there, we are informed, are just "training" and "advising" the Colombian military, which we are told is fighting against "drug lords."
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