If one believes, as the article states, that the "number of troops would begin to decline in August 2011 and that the additional personnel would be fully withdrawn by January 2102", then I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I can sell you at a very cheap price. One can also be sure that as soon as the Pentagon makes their request for more funds, that the Congress will meekly and compliantly go along with their war-making request. When the Pentagon and the President say to Congress jump!, the members of Congress respond back, how high?

There needs to be a member of Congress [Dennis Kucinich perhaps] who, while Congress supposedly "debates" this issue, will hold up a picture of a dead and/or mangled body of an Afghan or Pakistani child and say to his or her colleagues that this will always be the result of granting more money which will then be used in the subjugation and oppression and continual slaughter of children and grandmothers in under developed countries. It remains to be seen if any one in Congress has the intelligence and ethics and integrity to carry out that act. Five will get you ten that the answer to that question will be a resounding NO.

Jeevee

And the u.s. government posts ONE HUNDRED MILLION plus armed forces to "help" the gentle people of Haiti?

The bulk of our costs will go to pay for private mercenaries. They are paid much more than American soldiers.
The Iraq War is a poster child for privatization of military operations, a process that began in the early 1990s with the first war in Iraq (Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm). More than a decade later, the Pentagon (and, by extension, the White House) has no idea how many contractors are operating on behalf of the US.

Last December, the GAO reported that the Army alone had "almost 60,000 contractor employees currently support ongoing military operations in Southwest Asia. By way of contrast, an estimated 9,200 contractor personnel supported military operations in the 1991 Gulf War."

A May estimate was 126,000 private contractors, one-fifth of them US citizens. Others estimate 200,000 -- a number equal to or exceeding US troops. And "some in Congress estimate that up to 40 cents of every tax dollar spent on the war goes to corporate war contractors."

Why is this war going on? It was started by lies. Our troops have no right to occupy any sovereign nation. This insanity is bankrupting our nation. We don't have funds to take care our ourselves and no business killing Muslims. Their only problem is living over the oil we want to steal. Be a heck of a lot cheaper to just buy it---or better yet, spend money getting off oil.

We must bring our armed forces home. Now. We can keep the forces here at home, well trained and ready to go only if CONGRESS DECLARES WAR---not whenever the President chooses to start a war. Admitedly the war in Iraq and Afganistan were started by Bush II, but Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen are all on Obama's call.