Surge: Obama to send 30,000 troops to Afghanistan -- but doubts they'll help much

Instead, Obama’s national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current U.S. force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-U.S. NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the “central front on terror.”…

“We have no strategic plan. We never had one,” a senior U.S. military commander said of the Bush years. Obama’s first order of business, he said, will be to “explain to the American people what the mission is” in Afghanistan. The officer is one of a number of active-duty and retired officers, senior Obama team members and Bush administration officials interviewed for this article, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the presidential transition.