Looking forward to the day when America’s interminable wars finally grind to a halt? Don’t.

There are any number of reasons to be way less than confident that our armies are ever leaving Iraq or Afghanistan, not least among which is that the people responsible for getting US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan tend to define “getting out” as “not getting out.” In Iraq, for instance, the deal has always been that all the combat troops will be out of the country whenever they’re supposed to be out, unless they aren’t for some reason, but there will still be some number of other, presumably still armed, kinds of troops there. At the request of the Iraqi government, of course.

One US-related thing both countries have in common is that they’re home to these great honking US embassies. The one in Iraq cost more than a billion dollars and looks like it should be a Soviet-era Ministry of Recreation building. It’s supposed to be very attractive on the inside, though, like a starship where everyone is sealed in for years because the environment outside is what one might call inhospitable. The one in Afghanistan is cheaper but will ultimately carry more personnel than Starship Baghdad.

There are some staffing similarities as well, although they may not bear overmuch on our permanent presence in the two countries. In Iraq under the Bush administration, many embassy positions were filled by members of a secret high school clique with no expertise in anything other than being members of a secret high school clique. In Afghanistan, according to the State Department audit described in the Washington Post story about the rapidly expanding staff there, it’s sort of the reverse: rather than hiring people who don’t know how to do stuff and promoting them to fill critical positions, the department is hiring people who do know how to do stuff to fill jobs that don’t exist with responsibilities that are undefined.

Raise your hand if you think any US administration, be it labeled Obama or, perhaps, Petraeus, will be leaving upward of a thousand US embassy staff to be defended primarily by a Marine honor guard and crack military teams from their host countries.

So that’s one thing, and no one is really talking about it. But one needn’t resort to reading embassy tea leaves when the stuff people are talking about includes suggestions that we won’t ever be leaving. Not too long ago, “defense” secretary Robert Gates said that the Obama plan to exit Afghanistan in 2011 is really, really flexible.

And what the president has said is, he expects that we will be in a position to begin turning over certain districts and provinces in Afghanistan to provincial or district Afghan control beginning in July of 2011. There is no end date on that. And the — and the turnover of control to the Afghans will be based on conditions on the ground.

And so we don’t — we don’t want to have to refight for territory we’ve already had to fight for once. And so we want to make sure, when it’s turned over to the Afghans, it stays in Afghan hands.

But this is a gradual process, and there will soon be 100,000 American troops and 50,000 troops from 43 other countries around the world in Afghanistan. No one should expect to see them all start to head for the exits on — in July of 2011. There will be a substantial presence, in my view, well beyond that period of time.

Nobody is really talking about that, either, but unlike the question of embassy security, it’s out there on the record, if anyone, say perhaps the institutional press with its intrepid reporters who are supposed to ask questions about these kinds of things, were keeping a record.

In Iraq, the staged withdrawal plan calls for US troops to be out of the country by the end of 2011—2011 is a big year for the military, except if it isn’t—unless those pesky conditions on the ground dictate otherwise, and even if they don’t some troops will remain to help train Iraq’s military to use all the fancy military gear and weapons they’ll be buying from the US. Which won’t be enough to offset the trillion dollars we’ve dropped on the project, but should be sufficient to keep defense stocks healthy.

But look for conditions on the ground to get a little stormy before that happens.

So there you have it. In Afghanistan, it’s a 100% dead lock that a whole bunch of US troops will be there long after the Obama administration’s very Gumby-like suggestion of a potential date for the possible beginning of a less than full withdrawal, while with Iraq it’s probably about 75%. Peace in our time!

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