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Obama Outlines Plan to Reduce Troop Presence In Afghanistan
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With the killing of Osama bin Laden already fading in the rearview mirror, an increasingly impatient public eager to put a decade of war behind them and bipartisan calls in Congress for an exit strategy from Afghanistan, President Obama sought to quell those concerns by announcing a troop down.
“Starting next month, we will be able to remove 10,000 of our troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year, and we will bring home a total of 33,000 troops by next summer, fully recovering the surge I announced at West Point,” said the president. “By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.”
That will return American troop presence in Afghanistan back to pre-surge numbers levels of 70,000 troops, compared to 32,000 when Obama took office. Thus, it remains an open question whether or not a skeptical public and Congress will be satisfied by the president’s plan. A Pew poll, for example, found 56 percent of the public wants Obama to remove troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible up by 16 percent a year ago – and for good reason.
Since the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2002, the U.S. has sustained almost 1,632 fatalities comprising two-thirds of all causalities endured by all 25 coalition countries in Operation Enduring Freedom. The United Kingdom is a distant second on the casualty count with 374. (Last summer, Obama reduced American troop presence in Iraq by 50,000 with all combat troops scheduled to come home by the end of 2011.) About $1.3 trillion during the last decade alone has been spent on financing 9/11 inspired war spending in the last 10 years with Iraq at $806 billion and Afghanistan, at $444 billion, comprising the bulk of that total.
The Congressional Budget Office recently reported the Department of Veterans Affairs will need to spend on providing health care to returning Iraq and Afghanistan war vets could run as high as $8.3 billion by 2020 compared to the $2 billion in 2010.
When combined with the Bush era tax cuts, experts expect war spending will have lasting effect on the nation’s debt. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates “the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019.”
But with unemployment rate reaching 9.1 percent and an unrelenting foreclosure epidemic weighing down a slumping economy, the president acknowledged the need to spend less on wars and focus on the American economy.
“Now, we must invest in America’s greatest resource — our people. We must unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industry, while living within our means,” said Obama, echoing a United States Conference of Mayors resolution on war spending.
“America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home.”
Now all the president has to do is to convince Congress to appropriate a fraction of the projected cost savings for additional domestic stimulus spending.
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