Quickly reviewing all major post World War II wars, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg asks a series of tough questions he would like the president to answer on Tuesday:

Does it make sense, for example, to spend lives and treasure trying to eradicate “safe havens” in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg?

Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to fight for themselves or prompt them to leave the fighting to us?

Can Afghanistan’s nominal government, with its President elected by fraud and its recent rating as the second most corrupt on earth, be finessed or somehow remade?

The sum we are already spending annually on Afghanistan is greater than its gross domestic product. Are there nonmilitary ways we could deploy that sum which would advance our goals as efficaciously?

Would even forty thousand additional troops suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation-building program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed? (Counterinsurgency theory suggests that it would take more than ten times that many; would forty—or ten, or twenty—thousand be only a first installment?)

Any counterinsurgency campaign, we’re told, requires a very long commitment. Is the voluntary association of democracies called NATO, organized to deter war more than to wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—a decentralized populist democracy struggling with economic decline and political gridlock—have that capacity? And what about Pakistan?

………………………………………………..

Speaking of Pakistan, Washington Post columnist Colbert King asks a perfectly reasonable question: But what happens if, in the face of an U.S. escalation in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda moves its terrorist network to Pakistan or beyond? Will U.S. forces follow?

I suppose the short answer is that Blackwater is already there, and U.S intelligence is undoubtedly working with the Pakistani military. The question is whether our soon to be 100,000 troops will be fighting a single Al Qaeda operative six months from now. Some would call that a reason to claim victory and go home. If we get bogged down fighting the Taliban, along with related and completely unrelated insurgents, however, that war could last a lot longer.
……………………………………………………..

A graphic from the National Post, a Canadian paper, highlights the geographic hotspots where NATO forces have suffered their casualties. The Helmand and Kandahar provinces in southwestern Afghanistan lead the way, with 342 and 210 fatalities respectively. The charts also provide some visually jarring data of the increase in NATO deaths and deaths from IEDs from the relatively tranquil days of 2005 to the present.
……………………………………………….
Reuters runs a speculative article quoting administration sources that believe the U.S will begin drawing down troops from Afghanistan beginning in 2013.

Their logic is that by then the U.S will have concluded its training of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan police, such that they can help themselves.

Other officials scoffed at the notion, calling it unrealistic. One truth we can be assured of is vague ‘future withdrawal’ rhetoric from the Obama administration, whether from his lips or in the form of ‘secret leaks’ to the press.

This will be done to damper down opposition to the war. Rank and file Democrats will say, “I don’t approve of this war, but I guess it will be over soon.” We all know how this will go down. And yet we watch…

The report shows that the U.S currently has 50,600 active military soldiers and 24,000 reservists who are not currently deployed abroad or at home on mandatory rest from their previous deployment.

Should President Obama honor McChrystal’s request to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, particularly for an extended stay, he would either drop the number of available active duty soldiers in the United States to the low thousands, or he would deplete the National Guard to the point that many states would not be ready to handle local emergencies.

The Washington Independent should get tremendous credit for this story. It is obvious to anyone following the war in Afghanistan that our troops are hopelessly stretched, with many serving their third, fourth and fifth tours of duty.

No one in the media is asking where the Obama administration plans to get these troops from, though some speculate that the recession will swell the new recruit numbers.

Additionally, the Obama administration has talked about using the withdrawal from Iraq to provide troops to Afghanistan. However, that withdrawal is going slowly, and many of the soldiers coming back from Iraq will need to rest in the U.S before redeployment.

As much as right-wingers love to clamor about “America’s security”, does it not seem absolutely reckless to leave the United States with such few soldiers on its home soil?

One final solution that came to mind was closing military bases around the world to provide soldiers for Afghanistan. I have not seen this idea posited by the administration, but it would be a nice silver lining to a troop surge.

Retired four-star general Karl Eikenberry, currently serving as U.S Ambassador to Afghanistan, recently sent two private cables to the White House imploring them not to escalate the number of troops on the ground.

Eikenberry warned Obama of President Karzai’s “erratic behavior”, and questioned his ability to root corruption out of his government.

The Ambassador also expressed frustration over the Obama administration’s lack of non-military financial support.

Eikenberry asked the administration to set aside $2.5 billion on non-military development in 2010, but his request has apparently not even been formally addressed yet.

So whenever any of you tout the argument that we should be in Afghanistan, as long as we’re focusing on building up the country, please remember, President Obama does not care about that.

Whether or not we should be spending billions to build a country from scratch is a whole separate debate, but it’s one that the Obama administration probably isn’t even interested in having.

Finally, Eikenberry, who served as commander of U.S forces in Afghanistan from 06-07, and was in charge of the Afghan military training program prior to that, wrote in his cables that sending thousands of new U.S troops would “increase the Afghan government’s dependence on U.S. support at a time when its own security forces should be taking on more responsibility for fighting.”

I hope the media really picks up on this guy, and puts him head to head with McChrystal. They are two different men with two different assignments, but they have equal credibility in this debate.