Sparta had 300 U.S.A has 30,000

By McClatchy-Tribune

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama told a national television audience Tuesday that he would swiftly deploy 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. But he said the new forces would begin withdrawing from the embattled nation in July 2011, because Americans “have no interest in fighting an endless war.”

The troop buildup Obama has ordered will raise the U.S. commitment to 98,000 troops by next summer, at an estimated added cost of $30 billion a year. The pace of the subsequent draw-down, however, remains uncertain and depends, administration officials said, on “conditions on the ground.”

Both the military boost and announced start of a planned withdrawal are intended to weaken and ultimately defeat the Taliban and to train Afghan security forces, administration officials said.

The goal, the president said, is “to seize the initiative,” finally, in a war that started after Sept. 11, 2001, and is not going well after eight years. The president said he wants to build Afghanistan’s capacity to secure itself and then allow for “a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.”

“After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home,” the president said before an audience of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. “The absence of a time frame for transition would deny us any sense of urgency. ... It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security.” Acknowledging the price of the deployment, the president said, “Our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended — because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.”

The president has in mind a time frame of 18 to 24 months for the new mission, one senior administration official said. Senior administration officials referred to the new strategy as a “surge” — a term familiar from the previous administration’s renewed Iraq war strategy.

“While we have achieved hard-earned milestones in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated,” Obama said. “Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years it has moved backwards.”

Already this year, the president has nearly doubled the U.S. military force in Afghanistan, with 33,000 of the existing 68,000 troops added this year. The additional force of 30,000 will include two or three combat brigades and one brigade-sized group dedicated to the training of Afghan forces.

The president conducted a three-month-long strategy review before announcing his plans Tuesday night. During the review, the military proposed sending in additional forces over the course of a year, with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, seeking 40,000.

Administration officials said the deployment of additional troops would occur quickly. “The force option that the president has chosen gets more troops into Afghanistan faster than any option that was previously presented to him,” one administration official said.

While trying to prevent al-Qaida from returning to Afghanistan, the administration also is intent on helping neighboring Pakistan with its own security and economic issues.

“We did not ask for this fight,” Obama said, pointing to the al-Qaida-run attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that claimed nearly 3,000 lives. “We must keep the pressure on al-Qaida. ... We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country.”