It seems to me, there was one clear message at the heart of President Obama's Afghan speech last Tuesday: I don't want to be there, and I'm getting out at the first chance I can.

It was all about exit strategy. There was no Churchillian rhetoric in defiance of the Taliban, not the usual bravado about staying as long as it takes.

It was an address full of internal contradictions. It was the product of a man whose career has been built on consensus, trying to satisfy all his political constituent parts at the same time. That is giving the hawks and the doves not all, but something of what they want. It said as much about the next U.S. presidential campaign as it did about Afghanistan.

Now I doubt that Stephen Harper can take credit for influencing the American president's thinking, but it is striking that the president has chosen the same date to begin his withdrawal as Canada has to end its mission.

That would seem to undermine any talk of the Americans pressuring Canada to stay on while they are moving out.

After 2011 however, some Canadian troops, perhaps as many as 500 will be staying on; if only to provide security for reconstruction teams in the areas where Canada has taken a lead in economic development.

The parliamentary motion which would end Canada's mission in 2011 is not well-defined, so the semantics of the political debate in this country will be over how many soldiers constitute a combat mission.

The hawks will say the parliamentary motion was meant to refer to whole battle groups, not to a few hundred soldiers left behind, not engaging in active combat. But everyone knows that decision will be made not by the soldiers but by the Taliban.

Anyway, the president has signaled to the Taliban that his heart is not into a long slog in their country. He made it clear says his plan is to wrap up the troop surge by 2012.

The insurgents may wisely decide to back away and head to their mountain strongholds for awhile where the human cost of digging them out is high.

After all, the Taliban have one thing going for them that American and its NATO allies do not: time. The Taliban live there, they are not going anywhere. And their long history tells them that inevitably foreign armies go home. And President Obama has given them no reason to believe anything else.