[TheMercenary]

Timely and speaks to the discussion.

News Analysis
Crux of Afghan Debate: Will More Troops Curb Terror?

WASHINGTON — Does the United States need a large and growing ground force in Afghanistan to prevent another major terrorist attack on American soil?

In deploying 68,000 American troops there by year’s end, President Obama has called Afghanistan “a war of necessity” to prevent the Taliban from recreating for Al Qaeda the sanctuary that it had in the 1990s.

But nearly eight years after the American invasion drove Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan, the political support for military action that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has faded. A war that started as a swift counterattack against those responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans, a growing number of critics say, is in danger of becoming a quagmire with a muddled mission.

In interviews, most counterterrorism experts said they believed that the troops were needed to drive Taliban fighters from territory they had steadily reclaimed. But critics on the right and the left say that if the real goal is to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States, there may be alternatives to a large ground force in Afghanistan. They say Al Qaeda can be held at bay using intensive intelligence, Predator drones, cruise missiles, raids by Special Operations commandos and even payments to warlords to deny haven to Al Qaeda.

After all, they point out, the Central Intelligence Agency has killed more than a dozen top Qaeda leaders in the lawless Pakistani tribal areas, disrupting the terrorists’ ability to plot and carry out attacks against the United States and Europe.

Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, said the alternatives would have at least as much chance of preventing attacks on the United States as a large-scale counterinsurgency effort, which he said would last 5 to 10 years, require hundreds of billions of dollars, sacrifice hundreds of American lives and have a “slim likelihood of success.”

continues:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/wo...terror.html?hp