President Obama is expected to announce plans to send more troops to Afghanistan.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Obama expected to lay out strategy for Afghanistan on Tuesday
• Anti-war Democrats skeptical of sending more troops to the region
• Reed: Obama must show that troop increase is part of shifting operations to Afghanis
• Rep. David Obey says proposed tax would create sense of shared sacrifice

(CNN) — As President Obama prepares to unveil his long-awaited strategy for Afghanistan, key members of his own party warn that he’s facing a tough sell.

The president is expected to lay out his plans for the 8-year-old war Tuesday night at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.

Obama’s announcement is expected to include a significant boost in troop levels. The Pentagon is making plans to send about 34,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan in anticipation of Obama’s decision, a defense official said.

Democrats say Obama must strike a difficult balance, convincing the public that sending more troops is the right thing to do in order to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible.

“I think he has to make a speech that shows that all of our efforts are pointed to our reduced presence in Afghanistan, but I think he has to also indicate again and again how critical this is to our national security,” Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a West Point graduate, told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Reed said he will support the president as long as he explains how adding more troops would allow the United States to eventually shift operations to the Afghan people.

Obama will explain Tuesday why the United States is in Afghanistan, its interests there and his decision-making process, but “the president does not see this as an open-ended engagement,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.

Video: Afghanistan war tax?

Republican strategist and CNN contributor Ed Rollins said Obama will have to address some key questions from within his own party.

“There has to be real clarity. Why are we there? How long are we going to be there? And equally as important, what is the mission and how is the mission different now than it was two years ago or four years ago?” Rollins said.

“Democrats have to be convinced. The president’s party is certainly very divided on this issue. I think he’ll have the Republican support he needs, but at the end of day, if this is not a bipartisan effort, long-term, they won’t get the resources and the funding to make it work,” he said.

The president ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in March. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, reportedly has called for up to 40,000 more to wage a counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban, the Islamic militia originally ousted by U.S. military action in 2001.

About 68,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, along with about 45,000 from the NATO alliance.

Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Donna Brazile said Obama needs to explain what has changed since he first laid out his strategy for the region.

“I think the president needs to update us on what has occurred since March that requires to send more troops, more civilians, and how will this be different than, say, what it was two years ago or even in the near future?

“So I think this is a very important speech to not just convince the left but to convince the country that this is an important use of our resources,” she said.

The cost of the war has been a sticking point for Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi cautioned last week, “There is serious unrest in our caucus about, ‘Can we afford this war?’ ”

Prominent Democrats close to Pelosi, including House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, are proposing to pay for the way with an increase in income taxes for all Americans, except military families. Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin is proposing a similar tax, but only for wealthy Americans.

“My point and our point is simply that, in this war, we have not had any sense of shared sacrifice. The only people being asked to sacrifice are military families,” Obey said.

“I’m very dubious about this whole effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but if we’re going to do it, we shouldn’t do it in a way which will destroy every other initiative that we have to rebuild our own economy,” he said.

Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, says he has concerns about sending more troops to Afghanistan, given the cost.

“I’ve got a real problem about expanding this war where the rest of the world is sitting around and saying, isn’t it a nice thing that the taxpayers of the United States and the U.S. military are doing the work that the rest of the world should be doing?” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“So what I want to see is some real international cooperation, not just from Europe but from Russia and from China,” he said.

Critics of the war have also expressed concerns about the legitimacy of the Afghan government. Afghan President Hamid Karzai won another term in office this month after his opponent for the runoff withdrew.

Sen. Paul Kirk Jr., D-Massachusetts, explained in an opinion piece in The Boston Globe why he opposes a troop increase.

“Without a legitimate and credible Afghan partner, that counterinsurgency strategy is fundamentally flawed. The current Afghan government is neither legitimate nor credible,” he said.

“We should not send a single additional dollar in aid or add a single American serviceman or woman to the 68,000 already courageously deployed in Afghanistan until we see a meaningful move by the Karzai regime to root out its corruption,” he added.

Obama, he said, has “inherited no good options, but a more focused strategy with no additional troops stands out as preferable to all the others.”

Americans are divided over the best way forward in Afghanistan, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released last week.

Half of the people questioned said they would support a decision by Obama to send an additional 34,000 troops to Afghanistan, while 49 percent were opposed.

The survey indicates that 52 percent oppose the war, compared with the 45 percent who support it. Obama’s Afghan plans met with skepticism from Dems. November 30, 2009 11:34 a.m. EST

The deliberative process behind President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy has produced public disagreements, both within the cabinet and war council, over the proper way forward. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that, with the president ordering his plans carried out, those divisions have largely been worked out. Certainly, he stressed, no one felt they “lost” with the final proposal.

“I don’t think anybody participated in this process thinking, ‘If I offer something in the Situation Room and it is not adopted, then somehow I’ve lost,’” Gibbs said. “I know there is a Washington game of trying to pick winners and losers. I think when the people step back and look at what the president’s ultimate decision will be, I think that everybody sitting in that room had a valuable contribution in making this a better policy for the men and women in our armed services and, quite frankly, for each and every American.”

Gibbs’s remarks seemed aimed at the disparity that emerged between U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, whose memo calling for a 40,000-troop increase was leaked several months ago, and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Eikenberry, who warned against a troop buildup very late in the deliberations. Asked specifically about those two people, Gibbs insisted that, upon leaving the final discussions with the White House on Sunday night, “both of those individuals in Afghanistan and the president felt very good about our way forward.”

A far more interesting fallout of the Afghanistan debate, however, relates to Vice President Joseph Biden, whose skepticism about sending more troops to Afghanistan was made public in a Newsweek article this October. By Biden’s calculations, it made shaky strategic sense to invest more resources and troops to Afghanistan when “al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan and Pakistan has nuclear weapons.”

Details of Obama’s war plans going forward aren’t fully illuminated at this point. And there may very well be a sufficient Pakistan component to the strategy. But if the two briefings Gibbs had with reporters on Monday provided any indication, the preponderance of attention seems likely to be on building up Afghani institutions to ensure that they aren’t overrun by insurgents or terrorists.

“The threat from al Qaeda exists in very real ways,” Gibbs said. “Not just emanating from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan but throughout the world. The reason that al Qaeda was in Afghanistan was because al Qaeda had the safe haven protection of the government run by the Taliban. What the president will discuss tomorrow is ensuring that we prevent the Taliban from being capable of controlling the government of Afghanistan as well as incapable of providing safe haven from which al Qaeda can plot and undertake terrorist activities like we have seen previously happen in the United States.” Huffington Post