news-record.com

President Obama said Tuesday that he intends "to finish the job" in Afghanistan. Whatever that means. Our mission in Afghanistan has become muddled, our exit strategy is unknown and public support for the war is waning at a time when Obama is expected to announce a troop buildup.

The war is heading into its ninth year, showing signs of becoming a quagmire. Enthusiasm for the war had been high. It started as a post-9/11 counterattack against al-Qaida based in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

American forces drove the Taliban from power after which President Hamid Karzai, our man, was installed. Corruption within his government is rampant and his re-election was flawed. But he is still our man, meaning we often anoint the wrong leader.

Meanwhile, Taliban insurgents are regaining their strength. U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, has asked for 40,000 more troops to combat them, though he concedes that might not be enough.

It is widely believed that President Obama will soon announce that he's sending thousands more U.S. troops to beef up the 68,000 who are already there.

If so, Obama needs to re-read history. Especially the history of the Vietnam War. True, we often trot out the Vietnam War whenever there are rumbles about deploying troops to foreign conflicts. Our country has never recovered from the trauma of that misguided war that left 58,000 U.S. service members dead.

There are parallels between the two wars. President Lyndon Johnson said our mission in Vietnam was to stop the spread of communism.

President Obama (and President Bush before him) said our mission in Afghanistan is to stop the resurgence of the Taliban, which provided a safe haven for al-Qaida.

Obama is expected to send about 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan in hopes it will do the job. President Johnson thought more ground forces in Vietnam would wrap things up. In 1966, there were about 200,000 U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. By 1968, the number had soared to 537,000. And we still lost the war.

For more than 10 weeks, President Obama and his "war council" have met in the Situation Room at the White House to weigh options. Columnist Maureen Dowd accused Obama of "dithering," implying that he was too slow in deciding on troop escalation.

But I say more power to him for deliberating. At stake are the lives of thousands of young men and women he'd be sending into harm's way.

The U.S. Department of Defense announced that 914 soldiers have died in Afghanistan, and the death toll is rising steadily. In October, the deadliest month of the war, two soldiers who'd been assigned to the Army Reserve's 422 Civil Affairs Battalion in Greensboro were killed in Afghanistan by a suicide bomber.

Though the human cost of the war is horrific, the financial burden is also troubling. If 40,000 more troops are deployed to Afghanistan as Gen. McChrystal has requested, the cost will total $40 billion to $54 billion a year, according to officials. The formula for determining cost is about $1 million per soldier per year. So even if fewer troops are deployed, the cost will soar.

The staggering cost of a troop buildup coincides with a huge federal deficit. The bailout of financial institutions and other expenditures related to the recession have put the nation in deep debt. With Americans already fretting about bailouts and potential health care reform expenditures, a troop escalation poses political problems for Obama.

There is deep division within the Obama administration and Congress about the escalation. Vice President Joe Biden, for example, opposes sending more troops to Afghanistan. Biden thinks our attention should be focused more on Pakistan.

Others insist there are other options besides assembling huge ground forces to fight the Taliban. These include relying on unmanned Predator drones, intensive CIA intelligence-gathering, paying off warlords, sending U.S. Special Forces on raids against insurgents.

But others, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, reply that you can't fight the Taliban from a distance. It takes ground forces to do the job, he says.

Or does it? The Soviet Union fought a 10-year war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Its ground forces numbered about 100,000. The Soviets still lost the war.

Rosemary Roberts writes a column on alternate Fridays. E-mail: Rmroberts@triad.rr.com