It looks like President Obama is following through on his campaign promise to focus more military power on the Afghan War:
WASHINGTON — President Obama will send an additional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan this spring and summer in the first major military move of his presidency, White House officials said on Tuesday.
The increase would come on top of 36,000 American troops already there, making for an increase of nearly 50 percent. In issuing the order, Mr. Obama is choosing a middle ground, addressing urgent requests from commanders who have been pressing for reinforcements while postponing a more difficult judgment on a much larger increase in personnel that the commanders have been seeking.
In a written statement issued by the White House on Tuesday evening, Mr. Obama said that deteriorating security in Afghanistan demands “urgent attention and swift action” to address a problem that “has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires.”
White House officials said that 8,000 Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., will deploy in the next few weeks, aiming to be on the ground in Afghanistan by late spring, while an Army brigade from Fort Lewis, Wash., composed of 4,000 soldiers, will deploy in the summer.
An additional 5,000 Army support troops and so-called “enablers” will also be deploying in the summer, administration officials said, which will bring the number of troops deployed as part of this presidential order to 17,000. The decision does carries some political risks for Mr. Obama, whose election was interpreted by many Americans as a mandate to bring troops home from Iraq. But Mr. Obama has now announced additional American troops are headed to Afghanistan before he has withdrawn any troops from Iraq.
The question is what the strategy is going to be.
Are we there to hunt down bin Laden and finish off the Taliban, or are we there to prop up the Karzai government ? If it’s the first, it has a chance of succeeding, although it’s worth noting that the bulk of the center of Taliban and al Qaeda power now seems to be located in the northern provinces of Pakistan, a supposed ally. If it’s the second, then Obama would be trying to do something that neither the British Empire nor the Soviet Union was able to succeed at, impose his will in Afghanistan.
[...] military involvement in Afghanistan. As I noted when Obama announced his 17,000-troop Afghan surge, it’s unclear precisely how he thinks we can win a war that has been going on for 7 1/2 years a… The question is what the strategy is going to [...]