POTUS dashes to Kabul for a few hours to press the reluctant kleptocrat Hamid Karzai for obedience to the grand bargain.  The deal is that Kabul fall into the condo run jointly by the ISI (Islamabad) and the IRGC (Tehran).  In exchange, Karzai gets money and a longer term for his brothers and partners to control the opium trade.  I am told that POTUS wants an exit from AfPak asap, and that handing Kabul off to its adversaries is an agreeable conclusion.  What POTUS needs is a semi-credible government in Kabul on order to declare a success for the surge.  The rush is on for a summer 2011 exit.  Pakistan is designated as local cop.  What has gone wrong with the deal, why POTUS flew to Kabul for five restless hours on the ground, is that Karzai will not take the deal.

No comment yet from the Blue House and President Lee at Seoul, who implores the search and rescue teams (below) to work faster in choppy, gray, wintry water.  A Seventh Fleet rescue vessel is inbound.  There will be facts.  Of note, POTUS flies to Kabul while the crisis in the Yellow Sea simmers.   POTUS knows that Tehran is linked closely to the Kim regime, and that Beijing is linked closely to Tehran and the Kim regime.  POTUS aims to embrace Tehran long enough to extract the American military from the region.  This means POTUS will accept a nuke chest in the IRGC's hands.  POTUS long-term foreign policy is to disentangle from bilateral commitments and to proceed only in alliance with a soup kitchen of Europeans and UN deputies.  American exceptionalism is discarded.  America working with various expedient and regional blocs is encouraged.  State calls it Smart Power.