In his speech tonight announcing that the U.S. will withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of next summer, President Obama cited the financial burden of ten years of war there as part of his reasoning for beginning to end the war:

OBAMA: Above all, we are a nation whose strength abroad has been anchored in opportunity for our citizens at home. Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now, we must invest in America’s greatest resource – our people. We must unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industry, while living within our means. We must rebuild our infrastructure and find new and clean sources of energy. And most of all, after a decade of passionate debate, we must recapture the common purpose that we shared at the beginning of this time of war. For our nation draws strength from our differences, and when our union is strong no hill is too steep and no horizon is beyond our reach.

America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home.

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Obama said in his speech that “tonight, we take comfort in knowing that the tide of war is receding.” Indeed, Obama’s order to pull out 33,000 troops by the end of next summer appears to be just the beginning. A senior Obama administration official said today that this is just an initial drawdown, adding that “we will be continuing reductions in U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond next summer, as a part of the process of transition to Afghan lead that has already begun and that will be complete by 2014.”

So one take away from the president’s speech is that tonight may mark the beginning of the end. And Obama is correct. The cost has been great: Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent $1.2 trillion so far on war and domestic security, and perhaps well over $2 trillion by 2021.

Tonight, President Obama announced the first phase of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, with 10,000 troops returning home this year and a total of 33,000 by the end of next summer. In 2008, Obama of course campaigned on a strategy of increasing troop levels in Afghanistan to help remove the safe havens of al Qaeda and other extremist groups. Upon entering office, the president subsequently authorized troop surges in early and late 2009.

That strategy, Obama argued tonight, has shown demonstrable success. “We are meeting our goals,” he said tonight in internationally-televised remarks. “We are starting this drawdown from a position of strength. Al Qaeda is under more pressure than at any time since 9/11. … We’ve inflicted serious losses on the Taliban and taken a number of its strongholds.”

During an interview with ThinkProgress and other media outlets at the White House this afternoon, a senior administration official stressed that, while the troop levels in Afghanistan remain quite high, the overall troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq combined are going down. The official said that there were approximately 180,000 troops in those two theaters when Obama entered office. Now, there are 150,000 troops, with a reduction to about 100,000 by the end of the year and roughly 70,000 by the end of next summer.

I asked the White House official whether they are taking the views of the Afghan people into consideration while devising their plans. “They want a smaller footprint and a greater sense of sovereignty,” the official said of the Afghan people, but “they don’t want us to leave.” He explained:

But they [the Afghan people] don’t want us to abandon Afghanistan. Now, abandonment shouldn’t be misconstrued, as it is by some people here, as therefore we have to keep 100,000 troops there indefinitely. I think the way they will measure that is what is the strategic partnership that we’ve forged. Can we be assured that after 2014 you’re not just going to pull the plug on this thing and let us — leave us to our own — leave us on our own. [...]

So that’s — I think that’s the read, that they want to know that the transition is real, that the footprint is shrinking, but that at the same time there’s going to be some international support for them going forward.

A 2010 ABC poll found decreasing numbers of Afghans held favorable views of the U.S. Approximately 60 percent said they supported the presence of U.S. troops, but only 32 percent said they had positive ratings of the U.S. work.

Today, the White House official conceded that the U.S. presence has indeed caused more violence in certain parts of the country. “I mean, frankly, we made calculations that there are places in Afghanistan where there is fighting because we were there,” the official said. “And it wasn’t necessarily people who threatened us.”

Reacting to Obama’s speech, the Center for American Progress urged a faster redeployment out of Afghanistan. The CAP plan calls for a drawdown of at least 15,000 troops this year and a withdrawal of 60,000 troops over the next 18 months, leaving 40,000 remaining in the country by the end of 2012.

Israeli commando boarding a ship during last year's flotilla to Gaza

The State Department today released an updated travel warning for Israel and the Occupied Territories. The update signified that it was issued “to warn against participation in any attempt to reach Gaza by sea.” The warning is likely in light of the so-called “Freedom Flotilla” of humanitarian activists setting out any day now to break the blockade of Gaza enforced by the Israeli military.

Last year, a similar attempt to break the blockade ended in the deaths of nine people, including an American.

The State Department warning said:

The security environment within Gaza, including its border with Egypt and its seacoast, is dangerous and volatile. U.S. citizens are advised against traveling to Gaza by any means, including via sea. Previous attempts to enter Gaza by sea have been stopped by Israeli naval vessels and resulted in the injury, death, arrest, and deportation of U.S. citizens. U.S. citizens participating in any effort to reach Gaza by sea should understand that they may face arrest, prosecution, and deportation by the Government of Israel. [...] On May 31, 2010, nine people were killed, including one U.S. citizen, in such an attempt.

The U.S. citizen killed was Furkan Doğan, a 19 year old permanent resident of Turkey who witnesses said was shot five times by Israeli commandos that made an early morning raid against the ship he was aboard. (Eight others, all Turkish nationals, were also killed.) The U.S. did not undertake or ask for any special investigations and seemed to accept the validity of Israel’s own investigations, which cleared the Jewish State’s armed forces of any wrong doing.

Both the blockade of Gaza and the raid on ships in international waters have had their legality questioned. Yesterday, the Israeli military attacked two Palestinian fishing boats off the Gaza coast, but within the limits Israel set for them.

State Department spokesperson Mark Toner recently said U.S. citizens who partook in the flotilla to break the Gaza blockade were putting themselves at risk:

We have made clear through the past year that groups and individuals who seek to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza are taking irresponsible and provocative actions that entail a risk to their safety.

During his recent visit to Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remarked that “America has no better friend than Israel.” As Matthew Yglesias pointed out, the statement is “absurd.” This seems borne out by a travel warning that tells citizens not to try to get to Gaza by sea so that they don’t risk getting shot by their country’s “best friend.”

Neocons and right-wing war hawks have been attacking their Republican colleagues recently for expressing doubts about carrying on the wars in Libya and particularly Afghanistan. The neocons have alleged that Republicans calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan are drifting toward “isolationism.”

That fight was on full display on CNN last night when neocon Wall Street Journal oped writer Bret Stephens took on Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) for questioning the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. “The grownups have left the field of the Republican Party,” Stephens said mockingly. Chaffetz fired back, saying the neocons are presenting a plan to stay in Afghanistan “forever”:

HOST CHRISTINE ROMANS: Congressman, a decade and a trillion dollars, there are those who say we risk throwing away great progress if we pull back too quickly and too soon for political reasons.

CHAFFETZ: Well, there’s always an argument to stay there forever. There are those of us that believe a good conservative position is to redefine the mission. In fact, one of the failings I think the Obama administration has is that it has not defined what success is. [...] I just don’t think we should be there with our men and women and I don’t want to pay for it.

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Given that Chaffetz mentioned that he didn’t want to pay for the war in Afghanistan, it’s worth it to point out that the Pentagon said yesterday that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and homeland security operations have cost the United States $1 trillion so far, which, according to one analyst, “doesn’t tell you is how much money has been appropriated by Congress, which is $1.2 trillion.” Other estimates have concluded that by 2021, the total cost of the wars will have exceeded $2 trillion. Indeed, when President Obama was deliberating the Afghanistan troop surge in November, 2009, he reportedly “received a private budget memo estimating that an expanded presence [in Afghanistan] would cost $1 trillion over 10 years, roughly the same as his health care plan.”

Today, President Obama is expected to announce the withdrawal of as many as 33,000 troops from the war in Afghanistan by the end of 2012. While this announcement is largely being portrayed as a serious reduction of troops, it is important to look at the numbers in context.

ThinkProgress has assembled the following graph showing that if the reductions are carried out as planned, the United States would still have far more troops in Afghanistan than it did when Obama came into office and more than at any point during former president George W. Bush’s administration:

This means that the troop reduction would not put us much closer to actually ending the war by the end of 2012. Rather this would simply scale back the second surge of 30,000 troops that President Obama announced in December 2009. It would also maintain the first surge of 17,000 troops Obama ordered upon entering office. This comes at a time when a record number of Americans want to end the war in Afghanistan and the costs of which are putting the United States deeper into debt.