Timeline fever is catching on, and now Afghanistan has caught it:

President Hamid Karzai demanded at a meeting with a UN Security Council team Tuesday that the international community set a “timeline” for ending military intervention in Afghanistan, his office said.

Karzai told a delegation from the Council that his country needed to know how long the US-led “war on terror” was going to be fought in Afghanistan or it would have to seek a political solution to a Taliban-led insurgency.

A US-led invasion ousted the extremist Islamic Taliban regime in 2001 and launched its “war on terror”, which has brought nearly 70,000 mainly Western troops to Afghanistan, most of them under a UN Security Council mandate.

If Bush would have kept his eye on the ball, instead of being distracted by that shiney object called Iraq, then we might not be facing news like this today.