The history books call Afghanistan “the graveyard of empires.” In the past, the British Empire and Soviet Russia have buried thousands of soldiers in the Hindu Kush Mountains. So why is President Barack Obama going to send another 30,000 to 35,000 troops to combat “violent extremism?” What will it accomplish?

Oddly, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are reporting this troop surge as the first step toward pulling our forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan. President Obama has promised to withdraw U.S. combat forces out of Iraq by August 2010 and support staff by 2011. On Tuesday night, he’s expected to outline a similar timeline for the Afghanistan troop surge.

Will Obama really stick by this plan? We already have nearly 70,000 troops in Afghanistan (and there’s another 30,000 allied troops in the region, too). If the plan is to “surge” and then quickly scale back the number of troops, will we be able to declare some sort of victory? Hopefully, Obama and the generals in Afghanistan have specific objectives in mind.

The Obama Afghanistan policy is that the U.S. needs to continue to set up training camps for Afghan police and military forces, then to hand off power to a stable government. But aren’t there some inherent flaws in that plan?

What will Obama’s plan mean to Pakistan and India? How will it help the Afghan “government” achieve stability? Will the Afghani warlords just lay down their AK-47s? There are just too many questions to answer.

One could argue that more boots on the ground will not help our foreign or domestic issues, long-term. Obama’s Afghanistan plan calls for adding more troops (at the cost of approximately $1 million per soldier) and then pulling out. Is this just a distraction from the current economic crisis? Whatever happened to Iran? Only time will tell.


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