Meanwhile In Afghanistan

In that other war we've been fighting for ten years now, the Afghan government is trying to get the Taliban to engage at the table rather than at the firefight.

Afghanistan will accept a Taliban liaison office in Qatar to start peace talks but no foreign power can get involved in the process without its consent, the government's peace council said, as efforts gather pace to find a solution to the decade-long war.

Afghanistan's High Peace Council, in a note to foreign missions, has set out ground rules for engaging the Taliban after Kabul grew concerned that the United States and Qatar, helped by Germany, had secretly agreed with the Taliban to open an office in the Qatari capital, Doha.

U.S. officials have held about half a dozen meetings with their insurgent contacts, mostly in Germany and Doha with representatives of Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban's Quetta Shura, this year to prepare the way for face-to-face talks between the group and the Afghan government.

At some point, peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government were going to have to happen.  It's pretty depressing that it took this long for the talks to even get started, but at least it's a beginning.  Most of all, the final talks had to exclude the US.  I'll give both Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton credit:  they both understand that any final peace deal has to be between the Afghan government and the Taliban, not the US and the Taliban.  Most of all, President Obama gets this, which is why the talks are happening.

Still a tremendous distance to go in any sort of peace deal in Kabul, but the fact we're even talking about it, and our withdrawal from Iraq proving our word is good has gone a very long way in facilitating that, well that's something that could never have happened even six months ago.

If anything, Iraq and Afghanistan were our country's lost decade, something we'll be dealing with for the rest of my lifetime, minimum.  One really does have to wonder where America and the world would be right now if 9/11 had been stopped and neither war had been fought.