When will the government see that even if they draft every male citizen in the US to fight these Wars in the Middle East, is still not going to end the battles! The Gov't knows this already....its been done since the early American Civil War.
Why? global economics, oil, new york stock exchange, deficits, recessions, etc., etc. And who's helping to finance the war? Really all the casualities and losses are just another bump on the road, it's the same ol' political bullshit! I have family members in the Marines that will be in Afghanistan in 2010 and sure I commend each and every military force out there fighting for our freedom....but at what price?

uummm, tamsam, Bush did not instigate the situation in Afhganistan...man, are you out of touch with reality...lol...and I don't think "YOU" are even in a mess...chillin at your computer...c'mon, dude...

Refraining from attacks into Pakistan on al Qaeda because we are afraid of destabilizing the government in Islamabad is no longer a viable policy. It has failed. Pakistan's Musharraf is fighting for his life against the growing cancer of Talibanization, and the quicker we debulk this cancer by excising as much of al Qaeda as possible, the better chance Pakistan will have to handle the domestic radicals. While the center of gravity of the Taliban appears to be in the south and southeast with its HQ in Quetta, always a Pashtun city, al Qaeda is centered in the northern Pukhtun area of Pakistan in a belt from the Kunar river valley to Swat and Pakistani Kashmir. Air strikes and and special forces raids across the Kunar into Bajaur, Chitral, Gilgit, and now especially Swat should be started immediately with additional Marine and Army SOF forces sent to Afghanistan, particularly to Kunar Province and Kabul.

Afghanistan was the place originally. Take the troops out of Iraq and send some of them to Afghanistan. Pressure Musharraf to do something about Waziristan. We know he won't go back there because he lost too many troops. Now we need to do what Turkey did in northern Iraq. Go in and route them out or bomb the living daylights out of them.

I really don't understand the NEWS benefit with announcing the U.S. Military intentions or strategies for a spring offensive in Afghanistan...why not provide a road map as well?

Thanks for naming the [US] military commanders and officials 'requesting' the surge. Other news outlets keep referencing "NATO commander" or "NATO officials" giving the impression that it is not really our own government advocating more troops.

Ask any Vietnamese or Cambodian Immigrant who lives here in the US, and you might be surprised by what you hear. (Clue, for you) It won't be what your lefty College Prof brainwashed you with.

AMEN HAWBUCK !!!

At least Bush has had courage to go on the offense in this war against the Islamo-faciasts when the previous Willy wanted to take them to court. Yeah, war does cost lives. Freedom isn't free.

Fight them there or fight them here. Its our choice.

Why more troops?? I understand that this is a mountain region they search, but as high tech as our military is why not use it instead of our troops?? Air & Missle Power, Drones, etc...I mean if they are hiding behind rocks, cluster bombs should handle that, you would think our Apache or Cobra Copters could handle any ground action, drive them back into caves, block buster bombs, then let our troops drag their bodies out...

Well I'll take the middle east as another Viet Nam if it means that after we leave the country becomes a peaceful nation that has good relations with other nations including the US. Look at Viet Nam now. Stable, at peace, and with normal trade relations with the US. And all it took was for us to finally get out from where we did not belong and let the native people determine their own destiny.

I hope this isnt a case of too little too late.

This is ridiculous. I support our troops, because my Fiance is in the Marines, but how many men are you going to fight and die for this war? It's atrocious. So thank you, thank you for making the risk of me losing the one man that I truly can't live without, even greater than it already is.

Let's look at the record for a second. Bush sends in 30,000 additional troops 4 years AFTER he was told by Gen. Shinseky (and others) that he would actually need 500,000 troops in Iraq. Then bush heads to the middle east for peace talks in the 8th year of his presidency after many advised he do so two years into his presidency. Now we're getting a 3,000 troop surge in Afghanistan 4 years after John Kerry and other democrats suggested we need more troops in Afgahnistan. Don't you see a clear trend here? The Bush doctrine has now become, "Wrong place, wrong time. Too little, too late. Would have, could have, should have."

when we invaded most counties of Iraq and Afghanistan we split our forces into taking valuable resource from both. we should have concentrated on one at a time.
defeating bin laden should have been the primary goal since he was the one that started this war.by not invading Afghanistan with everything we had at our disposal we gave that that Islamic mongrel
a chance to regroup his force and escape.
and use his cowardly ways to bend and warp the people to his cowardly ways. in closing should whatever is necessary to destroy and his followers to hell with the soft glove approach with these animals

The plan to invade Afghanistan was on the table before 9/11. Coincidence I guess. Regardless, it should have been a hunt for Bin Laden, but instead it turned out to be another occupation. This has happened before. Coincidence I guess... NOT.

I am very sorry to say this, but the surge in Iraq and now the needed one in Afghanistan were and are too little too late. What we have accomplished in both places has been historic. We killed a bunch of bad, bad people and brought a taste of freedom to both these countries. Unfortunately it is time for us to come home and let them figure it out for themselves. They know if they threaten or attack us again we will squash them...but we have nothing else that we can physically do in either theater. If we stay longer, the casualities for our troops will go up maybe even way up as the insurgents in Iraq have had several months to regroup, yet our forces are tired and over deployed. While Bush claims great success, the killed in action in both Iraq and Afghanistan were higher in 2007 than any other year since the wars began. 2008 will be worse if we do not leave.

Last week Afghanistan appealed for foreign help to combat a wheat shortage. If you really want to fight the Taliban and everything they stand for. We need to make sure the people of Afghanistan have food. The Taliban use this to help find hungry recruits with the promise of money and food for there families. Funding the Taliban is the heroin trade 80% of the worlds drug comes from this country. Very sad how our foreign policy has failed and will continue to fail without major changes.

John,

How right you are,unfortunately. The Middle East IS starting to look like another Vietnam: not because we're losing (we didn't lose militarily in 'Nam and the returning ground-pounders I've talked to tell me we're not losing militarily in Iraq). No, the resemblance is that: 1) We didn't have enough force on the ground on Day One to do the job that was required (in both cases an egomanaical SecDef made that decision over the objections of his generals); 2) since good news doesn't sell papers, the media focus was almost exclusively on the problems rather than the much more numerous successes; 3) the war was micro-managed by civilian bean counters, and; 4) most damning of all, we made a solemn commitment to those people but began to abandon them when it became inconvenient to stay and honor our promises.

That last point is the one that really sticks out. If we throw the Iraqi's to the wolves as we did with the Vietnamese, not only will we become a pariah to the rest of the world, we will lose whatever credibility we may once have had. Even worse, we will have shown that our national honor is lost and we may never be able to get it back. We will become a second rate country, at best, and we will deserve our mantle of shame.

It is this that makes me so horribly sad: the country I have loved, fought for, and sacrificed home, family, and body for is committing suicide in front of my eyes, and I seem to be powerless to stop it.

John McCain might be able to turn things around, or at least put us on that path, but precisely because of that it is unlikely that he will be elected. We appear to have become a society in which only fools and poltroons can high attain office and where a straight-talking veteran is viewed as the enemy.

How did we get this way??

Let's go back and fix it? Full steam ahead? Uhhhh....where have you been? Our troops are wornout from constant deployments and very little time in between. Who's gonna go and fix it?

Get that draft going now! There are plenty of countries that need to be invaded right away!

The bad guys of 9/11 were in Afghanistan in the first place. We should had never depleted our military from Afghanistan in the first place until we got rid of Bin Laden and his GOONS! Lets go back and fix it. Full steam ahead.

It's about time. Unfortunately it's not enough. With the instability in Pakistan, we should have another 30 to 50 thousand boots on the ground. This is where the real war is being fought. We are in a stalemate because we don't have the nerve to fully commit to this theater because of the fiasco in Iraq.

Here we go again?we cannot police all the countrys you dumb congress people.Bush is leaving us to fight all his battles.

The situation if Afghanistan will depend on the stability in Pakistan. With Bhutto's assassination, which has left the Islamists empowered while Musharraf [seculars] weakened because of wrong finger-pointing -- the possiblity of better stability in Pakistan is slim. Wonder, how this small surge will make a difference under this precarious situation.

Shocking!

Thanks for the mess you've gotten us into George!