Obama’s Afghanistan Numbers Not Adding Up

Conn Carroll / December 16, 2009

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reports from Afghanistan:

I asked Lt Gen. David Rodriquez, the No. 2 US commander here, in a briefing tonight how long the deployment of the extra 30,000 would take. He answered that “it will happen between nine and eleven months,” starting in January 2010. Which means that some troops might not arrive until November 2010.

The next month after that, December 2010, is when Obama plans to assess how well the troops are doing — so he can decide how many to pull out when the withdrawal begins in July 2011. That doesn’t give him much time to make good decisions.

Am I the only person who worries that “fuzzy math” is being used here?

No he’s not. Heritage scholars Lisa Curtis and James Phillips wrote after President Obama’s Afghanistan speech: (more…)