He has already ordered an increase of 21,000 troops, which will bring the American total to 68,000, and will be considering a request for more troops that is about to come from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

These will be troops heading into the flames of a no-win situation. We’re fighting on behalf of an incompetent and hopelessly corrupt government in Afghanistan. If our ultimate goal, as the administration tells us, is a government that can effectively run the country, protect its own population and defeat the Taliban, our troops will be fighting and dying in Afghanistan for many, many years to come.

Image Bob Herbert

And they will be fighting and dying in a particularly unforgiving environment. Afghanistan is a mountainous, mostly rural country with notoriously difficult, lonely and dangerous roads  a pitch-perfect environment for terrorists and guerrillas. Linda Bilmes, a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has been working with the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz to document the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She told me:

“The cost per troop of keeping the troops in Afghanistan is higher than the cost in Iraq because of the really difficult overland supply route and the heavy dependence on airlifting all kinds of supplies. There has been such a lot of trouble with the security of the supplies, and that, of course, becomes even more complicated the more troops you put in. So we’re estimating that, on average, the cost per troop in Afghanistan is at least 30 percent higher than it is in Iraq.”

The thought of escalating our involvement in Afghanistan reminded me of an exchange that David Halberstam described in “The Best and the Brightest.” It occurred as plans were being developed for the expansion of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy, who served as national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, showed some of the elaborate and sophisticated plans to one of his aides. The aide was impressed, but also concerned.