No matter what you think of it, the kind of troop increase that President Obama announced tonight is going to be expensive. With an estimated $1 billion dollar price tag for each additional thousand troops deployed, the new strategy will drive costs well above the $130 billion originally budgeted by the administration for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal year 2010, likely requiring a supplemental spending bill to pass sometime early next year. You can expect the fight over that bill to get nasty.
But unlike most of the rest of President Obama’s big ticket items, this one hasn’t broken down along partisan lines. Democrats are balking in droves, and the White House may actually gain the backing of Republicans who have been pushing for an increase along the lines of what General Stanley McChrystal requested in September. Obama’s team will have its hands full cobbling together enough people from both sides of the aisle to get what it wants. Here are a few key congressmen that the White House will have to convince, and where they fall.
Name: Carl Levin (D-Michigan)
Position: Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee
Wants: Self-sufficiency for Afghans
Why He Matters: Levin voiced his opposition to sending more troops to Afghanistan in September, but seems willing to support the president if his proposed strategy places special emphasis on building the capacity of the Afghan army to defend itself. "The key here is an Afghan surge. Not an American surge," he told CBS’s “Face The Nation.” He’s also unwilling, after eight years of the Bush administration’s attempts to hide the full cost of its foreign engagements, to let Obama fund a troop escalation through budget tricks or back channels.
With that in mind, Levin is entertaining congressman David Obey’s proposal to fund increased war spending through a tax increase, but says that the country is facing such economic stress that only those making over $250,000 should be targeted. His opinions on military matters carry substantial weight among senate Democrats (together with colleague Jack Reed, he forced five separate votes on drawing down the scope of the war in Iraq over a 16 month period, winning more votes each time), so Obama must demonstrate that his plan does enough to put the Afghan government on a path to self-sufficiency if he wants to maintain support from within his party.
Name: Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-California)
Position: Ranking member of the International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
Wants: Tribal engagement, no troop increase
Why he matters: Dana Rohrabacher, whose presence in the House has been summed up as “colorful,” hasn’t historically been a power player in the Afghanistan debate. But he turned heads and gained liberal plaudits in November, first by praising President Obama’s slow approach to decisionmaking in Afghanistan, and then by coming out strongly against a troop surge and in favor of a bottom-up strategy that would not require additional U.S. forces.
Rohrabacher at least speaks from some experience. In a long, winding floor speech last month, he told of his days spent personally fighting the Taliban in the waning months of the Reagan administration, and of his efforts during the Clinton years to “build an anti-Taliban coalition by uniting ethnic and tribal leaders.” He claimed credit for helping to forge the Northern Alliance, which he said was the force primarily responsible for driving the Taliban south, a “tremendous victory” achieved without vast numbers of U.S. troops. He backs an approach articulated by former Special Forces Major Jim Gant in a paper that has been making the rounds in defense policy circles--and praised last month by David Ignatius--recommending ground-level engagement and integration with Afghan tribes to avoid the perception of overbearing American authority.
Power player or not, Rohrabacher has already started building alliances with liberal Democrats skeptical of a surge strategy, and could be a key bridge in presenting bipartisan opposition to funding for more troops.
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