Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
If I were Pres. Obama (which I'm not and I don't write the playbook), I'd get the man out of Astan to a secure location in the US - and take the short term flak.
Unfortunately the flak is likely to be long term. Different environment of course, but one of the lasting and serious irritants over the military bases in my locale was the US habit of whisking away people accused of crimes. The flak didn't go away, if anything it escalated to mythical levels.

The only thing the US could do to alleviate local anger is to turn the guy over to local justice, which we won't do. No matter what the US does with him, it will be seen as insufficient, a coverup, or both.

More than ever I'm getting the feeling it's time to pack up, tell the Afghans something like "we're sorry for the inconvenience of our presence and we really, really hope you don't make us come back", and go away from that place. They'll sort something out; it will be a mess but it will be their mess. This is just not going anywhere we want to be.

Of course we won't do that either; if we were going to we should have done it a long time ago... IMO of course.