This CBS story does a really terrible job of explaining that there are simply not enough uncommitted Army combat brigades to send 40,000 to Afghanistan with any kind of rapidity, as discussed here. It makes it seem like Obama is choosing to stagger troops into Afghanistan in an ineffective way.

The first combat troops would not arrive until early next year and it would be the end of 2010 before they were all there. That makes this Afghanistan surge very different from the Iraq surge, in which 30,000 troops descended on Baghdad and the surrounding area in just five months.

Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute says a slow motion surge will produce slow motion results.

“If they’re going to be sort of trickled in very slowly over the course of a year than it’s unlikely to have a very decisive impact in the course of 2010,” he said.

Uh, and why the hell is Obama doing it this way? Because there’s little other choice. But you won’t know that from reading the CBS piece. Nor will you get any discussion of the obvious question the whole thing begs. If you can’t get these troops to Afghanistan in the time that McChrystal says it’ll make a difference (“Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” McChrystal Review, at section 1-2) then why should we do it?