President Obama is expected to announce within a week if and how many combat troops he plans to withdraw from the war in Afghanistan. Some of those who will be most impacted by the decision are U.S. soldiers and their families and Afghans who have been dealing with the ramifications of the war for nearly a decade.

Yet the war is affecting more than just Western soldiers and their families and Afghan citizens. It has become a costly drain on our nation’s treasury; the money that is being spent on the war represents resources that are being drained away from important domestic priorities in a nation with sky-high unemployment and crumbling infrastructure.

Using data from the National Priorities Project, ThinkProgress calculated ten investments America could’ve afforded if it didn’t spend $113 billion — the allotment made in Fiscal Year 2011 — on the war in Afghanistan. Each one of these policy options represents an equivalent $113 billion cost:

– Provide 57.5 Million Children With Low-Income Health Care For 2011

– Provide 23 Million People With Low-Income Health Coverage In 2011

– Give 20.2 Million $5,500 Pell Grants To Students In 2011

– Provide 14.35 million Military Veterans With VA Medical Care In 2011

– Give 14.7 million Children Head Start Funding In 2011

– Give 14.26 Million Scholarships To University Students In 2011

– Employ 1.93 million Firefighters In 2011

– Hire 1.75 Million Elementary School Teachers In 2011

– Hire 1.65 Million Police Officers In 2011

– Equip 67.8 Million Households With The Ability To Use Wind Power In 2011

– Equip 25.39 Million Households With The Ability To Use Solar Photovoltaic Energy In 2011

Of course, none of this accounts for the human cost of losing our sons and daughters in war. 177 American soldiers have died in combat in 2011, and countless Afghans lost their lives as well.

As decision-makers plot their next steps in Afghanistan, they should weigh these costs as they determine the fate of a war that most Americans oppose and that even Republicans are beginning to back away from.

Our guest blogger, Lauren Jenkins, works on post-conflict peacebuilding issues and writes about national security at her blog International Development Without Pity.

As July 9 and South Sudan’s independence from northern Sudan draws nearer, violent attacks by the North on the South and its border areas are increasing in frequency and intensity. In Abyei, a disputed border region, upwards of 113,000 people have fled clashes between the northern and southern armies.

Yesterday, President Obama met with Princeton Lyman, his Special Envoy to Sudan, and the readout from the White House was one of cautious condemnation:

The President expressed deep concern over the violence and the lack of humanitarian access, and he underscored the urgent need to get back to cooperative negotiations to enable full and timely implementation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

The President is “following the situation closely” while Ambassador Lyman works to achieve “a cessation of hostilities across the region and to support the emergence of two viable states at peace.”

Indeed, a peaceful conclusion to twenty years of civil war was the goal of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and should be still. That’s why suggestions by Representative Donald Payne (D-NJ) to arm South Sudan made at a subcommittee hearing on Thursday are so worrisome. Specifically, he referred to revisiting a 2008 decision by President Bush to provide air defense systems to South Sudan. That request was never fulfilled because, according to Bush administration officials, the Southern Sudanese army was not trained and equipped to use and maintain the systems.

Arming South Sudan with air defense systems would put them into deeper conflict with the North, not bring the two closer to peace. Further, South Sudan’s army still doesn’t have the requisite training to use and maintain an air defense system. That poses a distinct problem when it comes to distinguishing friendly aircraft from the North’s attack aircraft. In 2007, a UN panel of experts sent a report to the Security Council documenting the North’s use of attack aircraft painted to look like UN aircraft in bombing raids of Darfuri villages. Were the North to use this tactic in the South, it could put UN aircraft at risk.

If UN aircraft are at risk, more than just their aircrews’ lives hang in the balance. When the international community floated the idea of a No-Fly Zone over Darfur in 2007, Sudan expert Julie Flint noted humanitarian agencies were “quietly but unanimously appalled by the prospect” and even if northern Sudan didn’t forcibly ground humanitarian flights in retaliation, “the United Nations most likely would, for fear of sending its planes into a potential combat zone.”

An ill-trained South Sudanese army firing surface-to-air missiles at planes that look like UN aircraft could easily ground UN flights in South Sudan and the border regions. Without access to life-saving humanitarian assistance, the 113,000 people already displaced in Abyei would suffer. Air defense systems might curtail northern Sudan’s onslaught of aerial bombardments, but they would not stop its ground forces or artillery batteries from launching equally deadly attacks against the South. In the end, arming South Sudan could endanger already vulnerable civilians, not protecting them.