Experts say such significant reinforcements are certain to pile more pressure on a stretched US military and expand America's already huge budget deficit.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs admitted Wednesday that each extra American soldier deployed will be at a cost of a million dollars a year, not including the added expense of training and maintaining a security force.

"I think the president has throughout this process talked about the cost in terms of American lives and in terms of the cost to our Treasury, and I think he'll continue to talk about it," Gibbs said.

Burdened by two wars, the American military already has more than 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and will have to draw on the handful of brigades remaining to carry out Obama's plan, expected to see the deployment of between 30,000 and 35,000 more troops.

With the vast majority of active duty forces committed to Afghan and Iraq operations, analysts warn Washington will have few troops at the ready if another crisis erupts elsewhere.

Casualties have been steadily rising since Obama took office, and sending in more troops is likely to translate into many more encounters with Afghan insurgents and therefore fatalities.

More than 800 American soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan, and October was the deadliest month since the start of the war in 2001 with 74 US soldiers killed.

Obama "must prepare the US and the world for the fact that the present level of US, allied, Afghan, and Pakistani casualties will almost certainly double and probably more than triple before something approaching victory is won," Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote last week.

Obama's plan also hinges on a calculated risk that a steady troop drawdown will be possible in Iraq, freeing up forces for Afghanistan.

But if conditions there deteriorate and elections are postponed for months, plans for sending more brigades to Afghanistan could be thrown into doubt.

The troop buildup comes just as the military had begun to recover from the effect of the "surge" in Iraq under former president George W. Bush, when year-long combat tours were extended to 15 months and time at home curtailed.

Amid an alarming rise in depression, traumatic brain injuries and suicides among soldiers, retired generals have warned the army could be permanently damaged by the strain of two wars.

But top US military officer Admiral Mike Mullen insists the armed forces are not yet at a "tipping point."

Mullen cites the "surge" of US troops in Iraq two years ago as a model, saying soldiers were buoyed by success there. And he says the US Army and Marines have expanded the size of their forces to ease the strain.

But military surveys show morale declining in army units in Afghanistan and marital problems rising for soldiers who have had three or more combat tours. One in five lower-ranking soldiers serving in Afghanistan suffers from acute stress, anxiety or depression.

Suicides in the army hit a record level last year, with 140 taking their lives, and are on track to reach a new high this year.

Apart from the human toll, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost 768.8 billion dollars so far and by the end of this fiscal year, the price tag will approach one trillion.

The average monthly cost of Afghan operations comes to more than three billion and will continue to grow as more troops pour in.

Moving soldiers and supplies across the rugged Afghan landscape costs more than in Iraq, with the military consuming 83 liters or 22 gallons of fuel per soldier per day.

War spending will feed a ballooning deficit that some analysts fear could undermine the fragile US economy, while liberals in Congress worry the costly mission will wipe out prospects for Obama's bold domestic reform agenda.

The president faces the task of convincing skeptical Americans that the war is worth more sacrifices in blood and treasure.

US skeptics fear Afghan mission turning into a quagmire
Washington (AFP) Nov 25, 2009 - Skeptics reject President Barack Obama's expected decision to ramp up the Afghanistan war as a misguided bid to fix a muddled mission, arguing it will draw America deeper into a quagmire.

Ahead of Obama's momentous address to the nation on Tuesday, even fellow Democrats in Congress are voicing growing doubts about the conflict while polls show a divided American public.

With 2009 by far the deadliest year for foreign troops in Afghanistan, critics of reinforcing the 68,000-strong US contingent portray the mission as unnecessary and unwinnable, warning it has begun to resemble Vietnam.

A USA TODAY/Gallup poll released Wednesday showed rising pessimism among the US public, with only 35 percent approving of Obama's handling of the conflict, down from 56 percent four months ago.

America was divided on the president's expected decision to dispatch some 34,000 more US troops. Half of those surveyed backed the plans, while 39 percent said it was time to begin withdrawing forces.

With the Al-Qaeda leadership now outside Afghanistan, skeptics have long been saying there is no vital national interest at stake and that maintaining a large military presence there would not prevent another September 11.

"Averting a recurrence of that awful day does not require the semi-permanent occupation and pacification of distant countries like Afghanistan," Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich wrote in August.

US leaders were ignoring the lessons of history, as Soviet and British military missions met with fierce resistance from Afghans, he said.

"Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it's also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires," he wrote in the journal Commonweal.

A former senior State Department official who resigned his Afghanistan post in September said the United States had become "a supporting actor" in the country's decades-old civil war between Pashtuns and other ethnic groups.

In his resignation letter, Matthew Hoh also dismissed warnings that Washington must rout out the Taliban and allied insurgents in Afghanistan to prevent attacks on the United States.

That "would require us to occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, etc," wrote Hoh, the first US official known to have resigned in protest over the war.

The US ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, has himself expressed deep reservations about a major troop buildup, reportedly sending strongly-worded cables to the White House citing rampant corruption in President Hamid Karzai's government.

Liberal lawmakers in Obama's Democratic Party have called for a timeline to withdraw US forces and floated levying a new income tax to pay for the war or blocking funding for a troop surge, warning the costly mission threatens to derail ambitious plans for domestic reforms.

"We are concerned about committing additional US troops and taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan, especially when the US mission is unclear and when methods for measuring mission effectiveness are underdeveloped or nonexistent," five Democrats in Congress wrote to Obama earlier this month.

A group of lawmakers, including House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey, warned that "regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for."

Although the proposal is a symbolic move without a realistic chance of passage, it underlines the growing dissatisfaction among some of Obama's staunchest allies over the course of the war.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee, has called for focusing efforts on training Afghan security forces before committing any additional combat troops.

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has questioned any US approach that relies on Karzai's corruption-plagued government in Kabul.

"How can we ask the American people to pay a big price in lives and limbs, and also in dollars, if we don't have a connection to a reliable partner?" she asked on National Public Radio.

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