President Obama will be announcing his Afghanistan policy at a prime time televised speech from West Point on Tuesday. He is expected to announce a buildup that will bring U.S. forces to around 100,000, from today’s 68,000.

As if that’s going to change things in Afghanistan.

The first thing you need to do when you realize you are in a hole is to stop digging. Afghanistan is a hole. A really big hole. It’s a hole the British Empire found themselves in. It’s a hole the Soviets found themselves in. It’s a hole we’ve been in now for eight years and adding more shovels isn’t going to fix things.

Not only is sending more troops to Afghanistan not going to fix things, it’s going to cost a lot of money and more importantly, it’s going to cost a lot of lives.

It’s a shame that our flavor of democracy requires such a large and expensive military to sustain it. Other democracies in the world spend a fraction of what we do on their military. It allows them to spend their treasure on more important things. Things such as universal health care and high-speed bullet trains.

Think of what we could do in this country if we didn’t spend so much on our military.

So President Obama is going to announce more troops to Afghanistan. Good for him. I wonder if he is going to wear his Nobel Peace Prize around his neck when he makes the announcement. Probably not.