Ackerman does the heavy lifting:
The sun rose today and its gravitational force kept the planet twisting around it through the void, so naturally Fred and Kim Kagan, the neoconservative wing of counterinsurgency, have put out a call for between 40,000 and 45,000 additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan in the next year …
And where does that massive influx of troops come from? Their answer is a non-answer:
It’s difficult to understand how the Kagans think there are 40,000 – 45,000 U.S. troops available for deployment — the Pentagon doesn’t think the Army can deploy a single additional combat brigade to Afghanistan in the next six months — and the report is silent on whether to increase the pace of withdrawal from Iraq (formerly a Kagan no-no); whether to decrease the time in between deployments, which the Army and the Secretary of Defense will resist after having to do it to sustain the 2007 Iraq troop surge; or whether to … I don’t know. They just want the politically treacherous 40,000-45,000 troop increase, and now the GOP will have a troop figure to say Afghanistan requires if Obama doesn’t provide such a ginormous increase. (They also back the consensus call for speeding up the development and deployment of Afghan security forces.)
What is the point of arguing for a strategy that simply cannot be done? My suspicion is that, like most neocon projects of the recent past, this is not an actual strategy for resolving the problem. It's a domestic political move designed to set up Republican cries of "retreat!" and "surrender!" if the president decides that pulling an LBJ on Afghanistan isn't a good idea. The way the McChrystal report was leaked also suggests a domestic political strategy of bouncing Obama into a deeper, longer war (on top of the eight years already invested).
The Dish 