Yep... more troops.

[departuresong]

President Obama will announce Tuesday he is deploying 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan "at the fastest pace possible" with a goal of starting to withdraw forces from the country in July 2011.

"The 30,000 additional troops that I am announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 ... so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers," Obama will say, according to excerpts from his speech at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.

Obama will say that the additional U.S. forces "will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011," according to the excerpts released by the White House.The president has a goal of withdrawing most U.S. forces by the end of his current term, senior administration officials told CNN Tuesday. Obama's first term ends in a little more than three years.

Obama is ordering the Pentagon to complete what the officials called a "surge" of reinforcements to Afghanistan by the summer of 2010. A transfer of security responsibility from American and NATO forces to Afghan forces is slated to begin roughly a year later.

The officials noted that the goal of withdrawing all U.S. forces by the end of Obama's current term may be altered depending on the changing situation in Afghanistan.

It would be his second escalation of U.S. forces in the war-torn Islamic country since he came to power in January.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/01/obama.afghanistan/index.html

And I definitely recommend reading this, too.

(Note: I see this more of a serious discussion than a debate, but posting in the Miscellaneous Forum would probably be inappropriate.)

 

[Tarvos]

He has to. He's torn between Scylla and Charybdis.

 

[#1 bro]

i'm against it, i guess. i mean i don't really know anything, but in principle, i find it best to stay out of wars unless absolutely necessary, and this... is not absolutely necessary. maybe i would be for it if we hadn't already wasted all our money on the previous retarded war.

also, while "liberating" afghanistan is probably doing the afghanis a favor, they certainly don't see it that way, and as for the whole "war on terror" aspect... searching an entire country in an attempt to find 100 individuals seems preposterous, and in the end, it just takes one determined sociopath to do it all over again.

also, who else wants to bet that the troops won't be out by june 2011, or whatever that date was?

 

[Tarvos]

they won't be they will START the retreat then

 

[#1 bro]

i could be wrong, but i'm pretty sure that obama did set a date where he said that every single troop would be out of afghanistan by.

 

[Vladimir Putin's LJ]

I'm starting to not really care what Obama does anymore because any decision he takes will be reviled by the Republicans anyway so he may as well not bother. I mean, if he hadn't commanded the surge, then they'd say GODDAMN OBONGO NOT HELPING OUR FREEDOMS and now he has it's 'pfft look at him sacrificing our boys WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA'

I personally think that America could do with involving herself with the least wars possible but since she pretty much made Afghanistan what it is today it is fair to help them. But I think the overall effect will be counterproductive and I personally wouldn't have sent anyone there.

(pssst it's Afghans, Afghani is the currency)