President Obama's plan for increasing troops in Afghanistan is in the United States' best interest.

My partner and I believe that President Obama's plan for increasing troops in Afghanistan is NOT in the United States' best interest. Therefore we negate the resolution. We define "best interest" as an activity consistent with guidelines established in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. We specifically make reference to providing for the common defence, domestic tranquility and promoting the general Welfare for purposes of this resolution. Contention one, the surge will not improve our national security thereby failing to meet the definition of being in our best interest. First, the surge does not strengthen the Afghan government or solve corruption in it. The New York Times' David Sanger writes that even Obama's most modest aims in Afghanistan "require a legitimate government in Kabul, one with the authority to manage the army and to rebuild an incompetent and corrupt police force. It also needs the ability to install competent governors and spend Western aid effectively." The surge will provide none of these elements. Second, Obama's plan includes a pullout date starting May of 2011. In order to hand the responsibility of security for Afghanistan over to the government there must be a great increase in Afghan military and security forces. According to Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, Obama's plan depends heavily on training 100,000 new soldiers and 100,000 new policemen over the next three years. It has taken 8 years to train the first 100,000 soldiers fairly well, and the same period for the Europeans to train a similar number of police badly. Can the pace really be more than doubled and quality results still obtained? The "soldiers" of the ANA are very difficult to train. Robert Pelton, an ex- NATO top advisor reports, "You don't need to train an Afghan soldier to fight, the real trick is convincing him not to use his body armor plate to cook his dinner." Clearly our soldiers need more than eighteen months to adequately train the ANA to be fully prepared. Kori Schake, an associate professor at West Point and a former National Security Council staffer in the Bush administration, said the timetable Obama is laying out is "completely unrealistic." Washington has been unable to commit the kind of civilian resources needed to help Afghanistan build civil institutions and has "an imperfect partner" in Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government, she said. It is unlikely to meet its goals for standing up an effective military and police force in that time. Contention two, Operation Enduring Freedom, the description for our mission in Afghanistan, has largely been accomplished. According to Major Jeremy Kotkin, Strategist of US Special Operations Command: "The specified tasks, and therefore justification for, Operation ENDURING FREEDOM were limited: to destroy terrorist training camps and infrastructure within Afghanistan, capture al-Qaeda leaders, and, through military means, forcibly stop terrorist activities in Afghanistan." Note that General McChrystal stated: "I do not see indications of a large al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan now," "We know that South Asia is no longer their primary base," a source in the US defense agency said to the Washington Times. "They are looking for a hide-out in other parts of the world and continue to expand their organization." In fact Al-Qaeda has taken responsibility for the recent attempted terrorist act on the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. The Al Qaeda branch that took responsibility is based in Yemen. The conclusion is that adding troops in Afghanistan does not specifically address Al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization with agents throughout the world. Contention Three- Taxpayer dollars should be spent in the US best interest. The President's plan represents an expenditure of the US government. The resolution asks us to establish best interest. One way to establish "best interest" is to ascertain if there are more important expenditures for which the funds could be allocated. Note that according to AP: Since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan only 861 members of the U.S. military have died in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. Now compare this to the number of murders in the U.S. According to the FBI and CIA, there are over 16,000 murders per year on U.S. soil and nearly 12,000,000 crimes nationwide. The projected cost of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan is $775,000. These taxpayer funds, which could easily be used to strengthen our police departments to fight the rampant crime in the U.S., would be an example of "US best interest" as defined in the Constitution's goal to protect the general welfare, domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. Thus the President's plan is not in the best interest of the United States because there are better alternatives for the taxpayers' dollars. For these reasons, my partner and I negate the resolution.