President's Afghanistan Strategy - More Questions Than Answers

By Jon Soltz
12/4/2009
(Jon Soltz is Chairman and Co-Founder of VoteVets.org, the nation's largest progressive group of veterans in America. He served in the Iraq War with the Army.)

President Obama's strategy announcement for the war in Afghanistan raises more questions than it answers. But some answers are starting to come, and they're not good news.

The first and most important question, of course, is the feasibility of the strategy. On this question, many in the media and Congress have dropped the ball. They are asking if deploying an extra 30,000 troops is doable, when the question we should be asking is whether or not it is advisable.

Of course deploying 30,000 more troops in six months is doable. But when you delve into the numbers, whether we should do it is much more murky, and what the costs will be remains largely unanswered.

According to the Washington Independent, the US Army reports that it only has 24,000 National Guardsmen available for deployment at this time. Further, the report found that even if the President decided to repurpose heavy brigades that are of no use in Afghanistan as light brigades, there are only 31,600 active duty soldiers ready to deploy right now.

If all forces currently in theater were just beginning to fight, that would be one thing. But when you consider that many troops there are reaching the end of their deployment and should be rotated out, we run into serious problems. 

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http://sitrep.globalsecurity.org/articles/091204518-presidents-afghanistan-strateg.html