Why do I say that? Because the projected numbers of troops, advisers and funding for Afghanistan are nowhere near the levels that most experts say would be required to make the country “secure.”

To be sure, President Obama’s declaration of policy back in March avoided any talk of nation building or democracy in Afghanistan.

His goal was (merely) “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.”

That sure sounds like a disguised case for nation building of one sort or another to me.

Our top commander there, meanwhile, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has been talking about nothing but counterinsurgency, which is another word for “winning hearts and minds.”

We don’t get to pick only one part of the country to apply it.

In any event, the numbers don’t add up for any kind of nation-saving strategy.

Pretty soon we’ll be topping out at 65,000 troops in Afghanistan (and the White House doesn’t want to hear any requests from McChrystal for more, according to news reports).

U.S. advisers are struggling to build an Afghan army of 134,000 and a national police force of 82,000, a goal hampered by corruption and defections.

And those numbers are supposed to secure the country, which for most of its history has been a kaleidoscope of ethnic groups and tribes?

Even Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair says that’s nowhere near enough.

Based on the consensus calculation for counterinsurgency force ratios, the DNI said “roughly 818,000 security personnel” are needed “to secure Afghanistan,” including 325,000 personnel to secure the Pashtun areas where most insurgents are located, according to Steven Aftergood, editor of Secrecy News, who obtained Blair’s written remarks to the Senate Intelligence Committee through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“But there are currently only 83,094 soldiers in the Afghan National Army,” Aftergood continued. “To grow to 325,000 soldiers would require $946 million annually, well above the FY2008 Afghan defense budget of $242 million.”

Rory Stewart, Director of the Carr Center on Human Rights Policy at Harvard, worked the numbers a different way. The Afghans need an army/police force that would cost $2 billion or $ 3 billion a year, Stewart wrote recently in the London Review of Books.

That would have to come from us, since the Kabul government’s entire annual revenue is only $600 million, he said.

There’s more.

“Defeating the Taliban would require at least 100,000 new reinforcements as long as the Afghan-Pakistani border remained open to insurgents,” according to a new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Neither the United States nor NATO is willing or able to pay the human and fiscal costs of reinforcements at this level,” added its author, Gilles Dorronsoro, a South Asia analyst and visiting scholar.

If that weren’t enough to ponder, DNI Blair told the intelligence committee that “Iran is covertly supplying arms to Afghan insurgents while publicly posing as supportive of the Afghan government,” according to the transcript obtained by Aftergood.

Dorronsoro thinks we need to reconsider our military offensive in the south — quickly, before all is lost.

“The Coalition should change the priorities of its current strategy, shifting resources to stop and reverse the Taliban’s progress in the North, while reinforcing and safeguarding the Kabul region or,” he wrote in the Carnegie study, “risk losing control of the entire country.”

Even as the Afghanistan emergency intensifies, however, support for an open-ended commitment to “the Good War,” as author Peter Bergen calls it, is waning on Capitol Hill, “A nervousness has developed, not only among Democrats, but Republicans as well,” Sen. Russ Feingold , D-Wis., told Spencer Ackerman in a far-reaching piece in The Washington Independent.

Feingold couldn’t “put a number” on how many of his colleagues feel that way, he told Ackerman, but, “I’m hearing more and more misgivings at this point. One thing I’m hearing from some of the Republicans is that they know very well that even if you believe that the surge was the key in Iraq [to reduced violence], that this isn’t the same situation.”

Not enough troops, not enough money. What’s a president to do?

Bring back bin Laden’s head on a platter, declare we’ve beaten the guys who attacked us on 9/11, and go — to Pakistan.That’s where the real prize is.

**Jeff Stein can be reached at

jstein@cq.com