How many of those Tea Party folks actually laid out cogent positions on the war in Afghanistan? It's this LACK of positions that one writer thinks may bring them into a working agreement with Obama...

QuoteThough foreign policy was assiduously avoided on the campaign trail by Tea Party candidates, who much preferred talking about the national debt, the subject of the Afghanistan war may be one of the first controversies they have to confront after being sworn in. President Obama will hold a strategy review in December, setting the stage for the proposed troop withdrawal, tentatively starting in July.

And if the president ends up looking for backup in the face of a military campaign to push for a longer timetable, some say he should not discount the Tea Party as a possible ally.

"The challenge for conservatives is that nation-building isn't conservative," said Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. For the libertarians in the Tea Party, he said, many will be skeptical of the prolonged engagement in Afghanistan. As the newcomers start "from scratch" in building their positions on the war, unburdened by a history of supporting U.S. involvement, he suggested a fracture could emerge in the GOP ranks.

"There are not a lot of them who got elected on that platform," he said. "It will be hard to kind of enforce a party discipline around the argument, 'We have to stay in Afghanistan.'"

Few Tea Party candidates staked out a definitive position on Afghanistan, a war that was overshadowed this election year by domestic debates over spending and the economy. But when pressed for details, some betrayed an unease with the nine-year war, in which the U.S. government continues to struggle to prop up the government in Kabul and stabilize the country.

Rand Paul, who won his race for Senate in Kentucky, criticized the "monolithic" Republican position on the war during an interview over the summer with the National Review -- while at the same time calling foreign policy a "complete non-issue" for him.

"How long is long enough? It's too simplistic to say there is never a time to come home, or that it's unpatriotic to debate. There are reasonable people, conservatives like me, who believe that defense is the primary role of the federal government but do not believe that you can make Afghanistan into a nation. It never has been one," he said.

Paul has also been openly critical of military spending. While he said in a videotaped statement on his campaign site that he would have voted to support the Afghanistan war, he would not say the same about the Iraq war, which he said "inflamed an entire region," and he posed a question that might apply to the debate ahead: "In the end, you have to ask yourself -- do you kill more terrorists than you create?"

Paul's father, Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, is an opponent of the Afghanistan war and a lonely GOP member of the Out of Afghanistan Caucus chaired by Democratic Michigan Rep. John Conyers.

The elder Paul had a message to Tea Partiers, some of whom see him as a leader in the movement, in an August magazine column. "As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad," he wrote.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/04/tea-party-obama-make-strange-bedfellows-afghanistan-war/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fpolitics+%28Internal+-+Politics+-+Text%29

Sounds like the author is doing what everyone else does with the Tea party, they try and pigeon hole it.
There is one common denominator in the Tea party, smaller Government, period!
As long as it's Constitutional, then it gets support.

In the case of Afghanistan, more have died under Husein than have during the life of the entire conflict.
So the Tea party will decide one of two ways, either they will demand Husein let the Military do it's job, or get them the Hell out of there.
The rules of engagement are the most insane set of PC Bull Shit ever devised by an idiot in the WH, only LBJ comes close.