Beset by mounting casualties on the battlefield and deepening disquiet at home over the United States’ longest war, President Obama’s Afghan policy now faces another big headache: the unraveling of central authority in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian nation that hosts a U.S. air base critical to the battle against the Taliban.

Just a month after agreeing to extend for a year a $60 million lease on a U.S. air base here, Kyrgyzstan’s generally pro-Western but increasingly impotent president, Roza Otunbayeva, has retreated from U.S.-backed security programs that Washington hoped would help fortify a fragile Kyrgyz government.

At times Tuesday night, it sounded as if President Barack Obama didn’t know what kind of speech he wanted to give. Was it a foreign policy address aimed at assuring a world-wide audience of America’s resolve in the war against militant Islam? Or was it an election stump speech to confirm to voters that the economy is job No. 1 for this president and his party?

The speech’s best moments were those praising the commitment, courage and sacrifice of America’s military. The president powerfully said that «our troops are the steel in our ship of state,» and all who serve join «an unbroken line of heroes that stretches from Lexington to Gettysburg; from Iwo Jima to Inchon; from Khe Sanh to Kandahar.»

The most interesting aspect of the news that there are CIA agents in the Afghan government is how quickly the story died in the media, when by all rights it should have prompted a month-long scandal.

Needless to say, Washington doesn’t care much about Afghanistan these days. Over the weekend, American conservatives staged quite a demonstration against President Barack Obama in the center of Washington, while Obama was busy preparing a powerful speech on the principles of U.S. foreign policy and the end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, or at least the withdrawal of U.S. troops. In November, Obama and his Democratic Party are going to lose the midterm elections, and Obama’s hands will be tied by a much more hostile Congress. This is enough news to bury the story about the CIA for good.

Those who advocate a reduced global American military presence are often accused by defenders of the status quo of somehow being naïve or unable to see the big picture. But the exact opposite is true — it is those who insist America must be everywhere at all times who are also all over the place in their logic, as their advocating for perpetual war continues to lead to permanent disaster.

Take Iraq. Now that Obama has announced his own «Mission Accomplished» and is reducing troop levels, Democrats are praising the president’s leadership and Republicans are touting the Bush surge that made it all possible. But however stable or unstable Iraq becomes in the years ahead, what, exactly, did the United States get out of this war? Did any of the reasons Americans were given for invading Iraq — that Saddam Hussein was a «threat,» that he possessed weapons of mass destruction, that he aided terrorists and was somehow connected to 9/11 — turn out to be true?

On the 1st of October the UN Security Council is gathering to once again discuss the proposed sanctions on Iran. Most of the previous meetings regarding the issue of Iran’s nuclear program have been a complete failure, since Russia and China preferred to stick to diplomacy. This session of the UNSC, however, may have a less expected outcome.

The situation around the American anti-missile system in Europe is strikingly reminiscent of that with Reagan’s “Zero Option”, when in 1981 the plan for deploying missiles itself became a subject for bargaining between the two superpowers. At that time the USSR was offered to remove the SS-20 missiles from its European part in exchange for nothing – the USA scrapping plans to install Pershing II missiles.