St. Louis Post-Disptach: More troops in Afghanistan will come at a high price

By FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Last update: October 27, 2009 - 7:31 PM

President Obama is getting a lot of uninformed advice. Last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney proved he knows as much about Afghanistan as he did about Iraq ("we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators"), accusing Obama of "dithering" over the decision whether to send more troops there. Too many people continue to believe the neoconservative nonsense that U.S. military can triumph regardless of cultural and historical impediments and the vagaries of asymmetrical warfare.

Here's a number worth some attention: $400. That's what the Pentagon says is the "fully burdened cost" of each gallon of fuel it uses in Afghanistan. The mountainous terrain, absence of pipelines and seaports and insurgent attacks on convoys mean that much of the fuel must be transported by air.

That's part of why it costs $1 billion to deploy every 1,000 troops to Afghanistan. That's a million bucks per soldier or Marine. It makes the math easy: 30,000 more troops, 30 billion more dollars.

The Marines say it uses 800,000 gallons of fuel every day in Afghanistan. Currently, only 10,600 Marines are among the 67,000 U.S. troops in country. You can do the math.

It adds up to a mess. Maybe Afghanistan is worth it as a bulwark against terrorism. Maybe we owe the Afghanis something after eight years. And we can't abandon our international role.

But Americans must understand it would be a long, hard, dangerous and extraordinarily expensive mission with no guarantees.

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