Obama's Afghan trip: 14,000 miles for brief remarks lacking one crucial word

Seven thousand miles, one way, is a long journey to share war remarks with countrymen that he should have and could have shared back home many months ago. Despite the administration's best backgrounding sales efforts, the document he signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a meaningless basic agreement to talk later about forging a real agreement. ... Nothing was essentially changed by what the media lovingly called his "secret trip" to the war zone, which was simply unannounced for security reasons. ... One little-noticed provision of the agreement Obama and Karzai signed Tuesday, however, is that American troops will remain in Afghanistan for not one, not two, not even three more years. They will be there for 12 more years, until 2024, helping. So, John McCain was correct after all about lengthy U.S. troop stationings. ... Nor, as it turns out, could the politically-inclined president of the United States find room anywhere among his 1,556 words for the seven letters that could make his surges and all those sacrifices seem more worthwhile: "victory."