Reactions to Obama’s Afghanistan War Plan

Gordon Adams a distinguished fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center, tells the Christian Science Monitor that finding an additional $30 billion a year to pay for the troop increase won't be easy.  Proposals for a war tax are unlikely to go anywhere in an election year.  So, says Adams, the government will have to borrow the money. Read Adams' further analysis in a recent Huffington Post blog, and an analysis of the Afghanistan troop increase cost to taxpayers by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. 

 

Obama's strategy fell on skeptical ears in nuclear-armed Pakistan, which Obama said was "at the core" of his plan and had even more at stake than Afghanistan.

 

"The U.S. is seen as an occupier in Afghanistan, and there's no way that can be turned around," said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physicist and defense analyst in Islamabad. He told the Washington Post that a Taliban victory in Afghanistan would be "terrible for Pakistan," but that the United States had created the problem and must "clean up the mess before it leaves."