President Obama firmly committed the U.S. to peace talks with the Taliban in Wednesday night's big Afghanistan speech. His administration, meanwhile, is rowing in the opposite direction: negotiating deals with Hamid Karzai's government that would keep drones and commandos in Afghanistan forever and ever. See if you can spot the tension there.

For the first time, Obama explicitly accepted a postwar role for the Taliban in the Afghan government. Obama made the U.S.' red lines for talks clear: the Taliban needs to break with al-Qaida, accept the Afghan constitution and end its insurgency.

But the U.S. has "very little idea" of what the Taliban's peace terms are or what a settlement would look like, says Caroline Wadhams of the liberal Center for American Progress. Some kind of power-sharing deal is the likeliest Taliban baseline demand: "It could be control over the certain areas in the south or some kind of shake-up of the [Afghan] system."

That's why U.K. foreign minister William Hague calls a Taliban peace deal "distasteful," even as he backs it. If the Taliban are just going to rule southern Afghanistan anyway, what was the point of two years' worth of intense fighting?

Then there's the next sticking point: the U.S. military itself. Nearly two dozen current and former insurgents told researcher Hamish Nixon that an agreement on NATO "withdrawal" (.pdf) is a precondition for peace. But for months, the U.S. has been quietly negotiating a long-term agreement with the Afghan government for a post-2014 U.S. presence.

Very little has substantively emerged from those initial discussions. But on Wednesday, a senior administration official described the U.S.' desired endpoint to Danger Room.

Short answer: the U.S. wants a lilypad for drones and commandos, to keep the shadow war against al-Qaida in the Pakistani tribal areas going and as an insurance policy in case things go bad in Afghanistan.

"We're not going to have kind of a permanent basing structure like in Korea or something," the official says. "It's fair to say we'll have a counterterrorism capability. So a strike capability, that we'll able to ensure that there's not that reemergence of a safe haven threat to us."

If there's one thing the U.S. has really invested in, it's building Afghan bases. One tally at the dawn of the surge counted 700 of them. The mega-bases in Bagram and Kandahar, both launching pads for drones, have been supersized. Same with a special ops headquarters in the north.

But notice that the U.S. is simultaneously asking the Taliban to end its insurgency while asking Karzai to let it stay in perpetuity for a shadow war against the Taliban's longtime allies. And maybe even the Taliban itself. Plus, the senior administration official believes the "strategic partnership" deal is an incentive for the Taliban to bargain – because it should convince the Taliban its war is hopeless.

In other words, Obama expects the Taliban to accept an open-ended U.S. presence in Afghanistan, precisely what it's fighting against. And he expects the U.S. to accept a return to power for the Taliban, precisely what it's been fighting against.

Maybe it's not just the military strategy that needs to fall in line with the political strategy for Afghanistan. Maybe the political strategy needs to fall in line with itself.

Photo: Flickr/Shahram Sharif

See Also:- Obama Won’t Use Troops to Save Afghan Hellhole (Drones, Maybe)