[COLUMN] Obama’s plan will neither win nor end war

Too little, too late.

That is the best way to describe President Barack Obama's "considered" decision on the war in Afghanistan.

After taking three months to "ponder" the issue, during which 116 servicemen were killed, he decided to take more of the half-measures that has been the hallmark of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan for the last eight years.

Unfortunately, the president's "plan" will neither win nor end the war.

Where the Iraqi war is an illegal, immoral and unjust war, the war in Afghanistan is a just one. The United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by a force harbored and supported by the Taliban, the ruling party at the time in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, President George W. Bush, instead of properly fighting the war in Afghanistan, sent very few troops and used the attack as an excuse to launch his ill-conceived war in Iraq. In fact, a Senate report released last month said Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaida, was within the grasp of the military in December 2001 but the U.S. refused to send the troops necessary to actually capture him.

It boggles the mind why the U.S. government is so afraid of victory. In fact, the word victory did not even once appear in Obama's speech Tuesday night.

Obama's new plan is simply an admission of defeat.

He plans to send an additional 30,000 troops. That is slightly fewer than 40,000 troops Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general in Afghanistan, asked for and not even close to what is need to fight the war successfully.

The increase would bring the total number of international troops in Afghanistan to about 140,000 facing an estimated Taliban insurgency of some 25,000. Under the U.S. military's own doctrines for counterinsurgency operations, a nation the size of Afghanistan, with a population of about 31 million people, would need at least 600,000 troops and possibly as many as 775,000 troops to achieve victory.

However, Obama, in his speech, clearly indicated he does not care about successfully fighting the war. The best evidence for that was his public announcement that U.S. troops would begin leaving the country in July 2011.

In other words, he is sending 30,000 troops in the spring and he will begin withdrawing after one year.

That simply tells the enemy they have won and that the president lacks the will to sustain the fight. All they have to do is lie low until July 2011 and the Americans will then begin to leave.

That would be analogous to President Franklin Roosevelt, when asking for a declaration of war against Germany, Italy and Japan, saying all U.S. troops would quit the war by July 1943 regardless of the outcome.

It is an improper way to fight a war by telling the enemy how long you will be fighting. The proper way is to clearly articulate the goal of the military mission, provide the necessary resources to reach that objective, and leave after achieving the objective.

Obama, though, did not articulate the goal, is not providing enough resources to finish the job, and is planning to leave at a specific date regardless of the state of the mission.

The basic problem is that we are trying to do too much with too little. Our goal in Afghanistan should be narrowly focused to crushing the Taliban and removing Afghanistan as a base of operations for al-Qaida. Nothing more.

The idea of nation building is absurd. Leave that to the Afghans.

Finally, Obama failed to explain adequately how he plans to pay for his brief surge in the war, which will cost an additional $30 billion to $40 billion a year.

It is possible that Congress could derail these plans. Here we are in the third month of the 2010 fiscal year and Congress has yet to approve a defense budget. With everything else on its plate, it probably will not even consider approving funding for this new effort until at least the spring.

Added to all this, we still have not left Iraq.

Obama should pull our troops out of Iraq and either dramatically increase our presence in Afghanistan or leave. There is no room for half-measures with American lives at stake.