Advance to withdraw

At West Point on Tuesday evening, President Obama officially announced his plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. This will raise the number of American soldiers to just under 100,000 by mid-2011.

Paradoxically, this is being billed as a way for the United States to separate itself from the conflict…in the long run of course. First we need to increase the size of the Afghan army and national police force by 400,000 men and train them to be less corrupt, less illiterate and less afraid to fight.

We also have to reassert control over much of the territory lost to Taliban control in the last few years and give farmers a reason to stop growing poppies, which only fund further terrorist activities.

We have to do all this in a country where the central government has only a little more legitimacy than a man claiming his suburban house is a sovereign nation. And we're going to do it in 18 months and then the president has promised to start bringing the troops home.

There are a whole mess of problems in all of that, not the least of which is that it seems highly unlikely that 400,000 new soldiers and policemen can be trained into a combat-worthy, incorruptible force in less than two years.

I don't think the problem is our ability to train people or our soldiers' skill in hunting the enemy; the problem is how much time, money and blood do we want to pour into making a modern nation-state out of a place that has never really been one.

The president took a long time in coming to this conclusion—a welcome change from the previous administration's dart board-like decision making—but it seems he really only talked to the Pentagon, lots of different generals, but still just generals. And what do generals always want more of? Troops. If they just had a few thousand more men, a few hundred more tanks, a few more squadrons of helicopters, then, and only then could we finish the job and have the tickertape parade.

We're sinking money and lives into a place that we have no real interest in any longer: Bin Laden fled to the mountains of Pakistan in 2001, and recently the Taliban has heavily distanced themselves from him. I'm not saying we should take them at their word, but he's not involved in that conflict much anymore and then the question becomes whether we should get involved in their civil war.

Furthermore, we should be much more concerned with the rapid weakening of Pakistan's civilian government in the face of continued terrorist attacks, because that country has about 100 nuclear weapons. On top of that, they will never help us truly get rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan, because for years before 9/11 they used it as a proxy against India.

Sending 30,000 more troops into a quagmire will not help us, which was the whole point of going to war there in the first place. We didn't storm in to make friends and dig wells; we can't start pretending now that we are there for anything other than our own self interest, and that interest is no longer being served in any practical way. And we can still dig the wells and build schools, that's what foreign aid is for.