PRESIDENT Obama couldn’t have chosen a more befitting and more relevant venue than West Point — the US Military Academy in New York State — to announce yet another — his 2nd in nine months — surge of troops for Afghanistan. The hallowed precincts of West Point have trained and turned out generations of fighters to constantly fuel the juggernauts of the most war-addicted country in the world.

The announcement of his decision to further beef up the already sizeable US military presence in war-torn Afghanistan by as many as 30,000 additional troops was quite anticipated; the whiff of it had been in the air for several days. That President Obama has opted for a more robust military presence in Afghanistan is no surprise at all. He came to the White House with an articulated sense that the Afghan theatre of war had been neglected and down-graded by his predecessor in favour of Iraq, and deserved to be quickly rectified.

Within weeks of settling down in the Oval Office he had rushed 35,000 soldiers to Afghanistan — bringing the troop level to its present strength of 68,000; with this hefty addition of 30,000 more, the US military boots on the ground, in Afghanistan, would swell to nearly a hundred thousand.

That’s the number of only those in uniform. However, as ruefully reported by the non-establishment media opposed to the war in Afghanistan, there are more American combatants, sans uniform, taking into account the burgeoning ranks of mercenaries and military contractors. Critics of war are arguing that by the middle of next year, there will be as many as close to half-a-million American men in the two-war theatres of Iraq and Afghanistan.

But more serious and ominous than the numbers game is the sense which any independent observer of what Obama has been saying and doing in regard to Afghanistan would derive; and that’s that in sticking to his campaign rhetoric that the war in Afghanistan is winnable, and George W. Bush’s second-guessing of it was dead wrong, Obama is getting sucked into a quagmire.

This quagmire may not entirely be of his making. The generals and war-mongers in the Pentagon have been tugging at his sleeves and breathing down his neck for sometime, as have been the Republicans whose predilection for the use of force has been a bane of American history, especially since WWII.

There’s no doubt that by succumbing to their pressure Obama has taken a very costly insurance policy. The Pentagon cabal seems to be working on him just the way it did on President Johnson when he was cornered, in the mid-60s, to send more troops to Vietnam. By pandering to them, and to the likes of his presidential race-rival, Senator John McCain, who don’t want to hear any mention of an end-game in Afghanistan, Obama has categorically signed on to their agenda and has conceded to play ball according to their choice.

In his West Point address, Obama pooh-poohed any comparison with Vietnam and insisted he wasn’t Vietnamising the war in Afghanistan. But comparisons are quite appropriate in the way the war effort is spinning out of control and also the way this war is dividing and polarising the Americans.

War weariness among the American people is a natural phenomenon after more than eight long years of relentless conflict in not one but two countries. On top of it, the way these wars have bled the American economy the American people can’t be faulted for turning their ire toward Obama the way they did toward his inane and clueless precursor in the Oval Office. Obama’s public approval rating has dipped, for the first time since he won the presidency, to below the 50 percentage points. This should be a cause of concern to not only him but also to the Democrats in Congress. 2010 will be the year of mid-tern elections in the US and many a pundit are already predicting a rout of the Democrats.

By letting himself manipulated by the war-mongers on Afghanistan, a la Johnson on Vietnam, Obama is clearly not only raising the ante of doubts about his agenda but also opening himself to the kind of criticism that Bush had been pelted with. Obama is, unconsciously, walking the plank that doomed Bush. He’s making the war in Afghanistan as much his war as Bush had made Iraq his main war of aggression.

The choice of the military academy at West Point couldn’t be anything other than a conscious Obama effort to send a loud signal to those Americans addicted to perpetual conflict that he wasn’t a softie on war as his Republican detractors have been painting him.

But this gung-ho Obama is the antithesis of that peacenik Obama the majority Americans had voted for in November last year.

Obama, no doubt, has strived and strained to still project himself as a man firmly committed to peace by blending the stick of war with the carrots of a projected commencement of withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan, starting in July, 2011. He has also not given in entirely to the generals’ demand for an additional 45,000 troops, obviously to not ruffle the feathers too much in the peace camp.

But Obama’s calibrated nuances are more of a ruse than reality.

As far as the withdrawal of troops is concerned, there’s no deadline of completion for the process. Obama, for the record, is saying that he’d bring all the “troops home” from Afghanistan before the end of his presidency. But that could easily be seven years hence, given a likely second term for him.

As for the troop strength demanded by his generals, Obama is leaning hard on his Nato allies to make up the difference with at least 10,000 more Nato soldiers in Afghanistan. But he’s likely to be frustrated by his allies on that account: except for an ever-obliging Britain, none of the other major European allies would be inclined to stick their neck out for him.

Obama’s three-pronged strategy on Afghanistan, on the basis of which he is plunging head-long into large scale military offensive is dubious.

The first prong of his strategy hinges on containing the Taliban challenge and rolling it back. But that’s deeply flawed, given the ground realities in Afghanistan. The Taliban are in control of far more territory today than they were ever before in the eight years of American military presence in Afghanistan. With his own 100,000 troops and nearly half of that number from Nato, Obama could, at best, hope to keep them out of major cities, which would still be open to Taliban-inspired sabotage and acts of terror, as so amply demonstrated in recent months.

Knowing the limits of military performance, Obama’s men are already talking, behind the scene, with the Taliban, with some input from the Saudis. The idea is to cull the ‘bad Taliban’ and do business with the ‘good ones.’ Taliban like Mullah Zaeef, former ambassador to Pakistan, are being seen as ‘kosher’ to cut a deal with. However, the Taliban supremo, Mullah Omer, is believed to be reluctant to play ball as long as the American and their allies are present on the Afghan soil.

Mullah Omer could well be reflecting the sense of most ordinary Afghans to whom any invader, from Alexander-the-Great to Bush-the-insignificant, is a trespasser on their land and untrustworthy to do business with.

The second prong of Obama’s strategy is equally flawed. He’d want the Afghan army to be trained to a level where it could take on the burden of managing their combat burden. But the Afghan army is already deeply suborned by the Taliban and the annual rate of desertion in it is as high as 25 per cent.

Obama also covets a corruption-free Afghan government under Karzai. But that’s hoping for the moon. His rhetoric of “no blank cheque” for the Afghan government may have sounded good to his domestic audience but wouldn’t win many friends among the Afghan kleptomaniacs.

The third Obama prong concerns Pakistan, to whose leaders and people he is offering a ‘partnership’ long beyond the guns in Afghans have fallen silent, because this war is as much Pakistan’s, in his vision, as anybody else’s. That may be adrenalin to a beleaguered Zardari but is empty rhetoric to a layman because Obama still expects Pakistan to ‘do more.’

One can’t be unmindful of the fact that Obama doesn’t define the contours of his partnership with Pakistan but expects a Pakistan that has been paying an exorbitant price for its gratuitous ‘alliance’ with US in Afghanistan to still shoulder a burden far greater than its capacity. The implied threat in Obama’s discourse about the ‘known sanctuaries and intentions’ of the terrorists on the Pakistan side of the border can’t be lost on any Pakistani with a sense of national dignity and honour.

Obama is clearly a man-in-hurry, if not in distress. He’s fast-forwarding additional troops to Afghanistan because he wants quick results, while his supporters and detractors alike want ‘positive’ results.

Therein is a Catch-22 situation for him because of varying interpretation of ‘positive result’ for each group. To his supporters, a positive result means a quick end to the war and withdrawal with alacrity. But to his detractors, a positive outcome is outright victory over the Taliban and annihilation of Al Qaeda. Obama is proverbially caught between the rock and a hard place.

But think of the subtle irony ahead: Obama will be heading to Oslo, next week, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize conferred on him, gratuitously. Peace prize for a man who has just made a huge leap forward on the war front!