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The somewhat clumsy words of George Kennan during the Vietnam War have seemed eerily appropriate to many reviewers recently:

If we can find nothing better to do than embark upon a further open-ended increase in the level of our commitment simply because the alternatives seem humiliating and frustrating, one will have to ask whether we have not become enslaved to the dynamics of a single unmanageable situation – to the point where we have lost much of the power of initiative and control over our own policy, not just locally but on a world scale.

And lastly the masterful essay by Garry Wills in a recent New York Review of Books:

We sink deeper into blood, with no foreseeable end in sight…Some leader has to break the spell before costs mount further while our wars are passed from President to President…Barack Obama said he would rather be a one-term president than give up on his goals. Here is a goal no other president we can imagine would have a possibility of reaching. Presidents who just kick the can down the road are easy to come by. Lost lives and limbs are not.

Annual funding for US combat operations in Afghanistan, 2002: $20.8 billion.

Annual funding for US combat operations in Afghanistan, 2009: $60.2 billion.

Total funds for US combat operations in Afghanistan, 2002-2009: $228.2 billion.

War-fighting funds requested by the Obama administration for 2010: $68 billion (a figure which will, for the first time since 2003, exceed funds requested for Iraq).

Funds recently requested by US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry for non-military spending in Afghanistan, 2010: $2.5 billion.

Funds spent since 2001 on Afghan “reconstruction”: $38 billion (”more than half of it on training and equipping Afghan security forces”).

This means that in 2002-2009 the proportion of military versus non-military funding for achieving the objective(s) in Afghanistan was approximately 92.9% vs. 7.1% respectively.

And to ‘governance’:

Annual budget of the Afghan government: $600 million.

Maintenance cost for the force of 450,000 Afghan soldiers and police the US plans to train: approximately 500 percent of the Afghan budget.

Holbrooke also announced that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is going to visit Pakistan to meet with government officials, leaders of the political opposition, civic leaders and business interests.

He declined to provide specifics, saying details are being kept under wraps to protect Clinton's security in a country that has been rocked by terrorist attacks in recent weeks. He lamented what he called speculation in Pakistan about the precise timing of her visit and the locations she intends to visit.

"I can tell you honestly that if the speculation is too well-informed it will affect the content of the trip," Holbrooke said.

"The American people are understandably focused on rebuilding our economy and putting people to work here at home."

"After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home," he said flatly.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., was more strident, saying he is against a build up of American forces.

"It is time to start thinking about bringing troops out of Afghanistan and reducing our commitment there," he said. He pledged to oppose a decision to send more.

"There will be resistance to this if necessary," Feingold said. "If necessary, we will act to prevent this mistake."

Lugar said the Senate should postpone a debate on
overhauling the U.S. health-care system to instead focus on the
war and how to pay for it.

“The war is terribly important,” Lugar said. “Jobs and
our economy are terribly important. So this may be an audacious
suggestion, but I would suggest we put aside the health-care
debate until next year.”

Representative David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat, said his
plan to increase taxes on people with higher-incomes to pay for
the war will create a sense of “shared sacrifice.” Service men
and women and their families would be exempt.

“If this war is important enough to engage in the long
term, it’s important enough to pay for,” Obey said on CNN.

Levin said it would be difficult to increase taxes “in the
middle of a recession.”

Their latest op-ed is a real gem, however: in a thousand-word explication on the necessity of using troops for political leverage, a lamentation of how the debate has ignored force levels (when in reality the debate has been dominated by a discussion of troop numbers), they can’t bring themselves to mention the Taliban once. I mean, even ignoring the ridiculous assertion that more troops will improve governance, development, education, law enforcement, health care, and whatever else… even ignoring all of that, they say troop numbers will fix Afghanistan but don’t mention why we need troops in the first place.

Somehow, these people are taken seriously. Do you get it?

Harvard professor Rory Stewart contends that it is not necessary to defeat the Taliban, anyway, in order to make the U.S. and UK safer:

Even if – as seems most unlikely – the Taliban were to take the capital, it is not clear how much of a threat this would pose to US or European national security. Would they repeat their error of providing a safe haven to al-Qaida? And how safe would this safe haven be? They could give al-Qaida land for a camp but how would they defend it against predators or US special forces? And does al-Qaida still require large terrorist training camps to organise attacks? Could they not plan in Hamburg and train at flight schools in Florida; or meet in Bradford and build morale on an adventure training course in Wales?”

The President's options: Four scenarios rejected by Obama

President Obama has rejected four options presented to him, all of which involve sending more troops to Afghanistan, and none of which had attached any strings relating to withdrawal, or reform in the Karzai administration. They were:

1. Send between 10,000 and 15,000 extra troops to augment the 68,000 US military on the ground now. Vice-president Joe Biden – a long-time supporter of counter-terrorist, as opposed to counter-insurgency, measures – favours this option.

2. Send 20,000 more troops. This, together with Option 3, is the so-called McChrystal-lite scenario.

3. Send 30,000 more troops.

4. Send 40,000 more troops, as General McChrystal wants. The danger is that it could give other, less committed members of the coalition all the excuse they need to pull out.

These stakes are important, to be sure, but they do not merit an infinitely high price tag. Afghanistan’s influence over Pakistan’s future is important, but it is also incomplete and indirect. A Taliban Afghanistan would make a Pakistani collapse more likely, but it would not guarantee it. Nor does success in Afghanistan guarantee success in Pakistan: There is a chance that we could struggle our way to stability in Afghanistan at great cost and sacrifice, only to see Pakistan collapse anyway under the weight of its own elite misjudgments and deep internal divisions.

We clearly cannot afford to wage protracted warfare with multiple brigades of American ground forces simply to deny al-Qaeda access to every possible safe haven. We would run out of brigades long before bin Laden ran out of prospective sanctuaries.

Karzai expressed indifference when asked about the withdrawal of most of the hundreds of U.N. employees from Afghanistan after a bombing late last month in Kabul. The blast killed five foreign U.N. officials.

"They may or may not return," he said. "I don't think Afghanistan will notice it."

Akbar Bai, a leader of the country's Turkmen minority — who Dostum beat and briefly kidnapped last year after storming his Kabul home with 100 armed fighters — said the U.S. and its Afghan allies are "fighting the wrong war."

"Karzai's No. 1 problem is the warlords," said Bai, who was released only after government troops surrounded Dostum's mansion. "If you don't remove these people from power, you'll never see peace in Afghanistan."