Raise your hand if you wanted to pound your head into a wall while listening to President Obama’s speech attempting to justify the escalation of our war in Afghanistan.

Consider my hand raised.

Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies had an excellent analysis of the speech and what the president said, and more importantly didn’t say, about this increasingly dangerous quagmire.

Among the things Obama failed to say, according to Bennis:

• There was no reference to the U.S.-paid mercenaries (both local and internationals, all paid through U.S. contractor corporations) in Afghanistan, whose numbers rose by 40% just between June and September, now totaling 104,101, and already outnumbering U.S. troops.

• While claiming the U.S. may not have the same interests as earlier empires, Obama has now acknowledged that the U.S. is occupying Afghan land not to protect Afghan interests, but to protect the U.S. and U.S. citizens.

• There was no acknowledgement of the widely held view that there are fewer than 100 members of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and perhaps as few as 300 over the border in Pakistan — so the U.S. will now be deploying more than 100,000 of its own troops, plus tens of thousands of NATO and other allied troops, in a global, lethal, impoverishing war to go after 400 people.

• Obama spoke of Afghanistan as a war of necessity, saying “We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people.” He ignored the fact that none of the hijackers were Afghans, none lived in Afghanistan (they lived in Hamburg), none trained in Afghanistan (they trained in Florida), and none went to flight school in Afghanistan (that was in Minnesota).

• Obama spoke of the existing involvement of NATO and other allied governments, and asked for additional troop commitments; he did not mention the massive opposition to the war all those government face (70% opposition in the UK, the highest troop contributor), with several countries pulling their troops out. He described the “broad coalition of 43 nations that support our aims,” but ignored the reality that many of those nations have deployed troops numbering only in the double or even single digits — one from Georgia, two from Iceland, four from Austria, seven each from Ireland and Jordan, 10 from Bosnia, etc.

There are more. The entire analysis is highly recommended.

Juan Cole’s blog, Informed Comment, also pulled together a number of informative items after the speech.

Concerns about the Obama escalation appear widespread. I flagged this one about the hidden costs of escalation from Foreign Policy, not considered a hotbed of lefty thought.

Stephen Walt writes:

But there is another cost to digging in deeper in Afghanistan. Obama has now bet the future of his presidency on being able to achieve something he can describe as “success” there, and he has only 18 months to do it. He’s shackled with a sluggish economy that is unlikely to turn around soon, so there are going to be plenty of disaffected voters by 2012. The Dems are going to lose a bunch of seats in the midterms, making it even tougher to pass domestic legislation that might win broad voter approval. And having alienated a lot of the people who worked their butts off for him in 2008 (because they thought he would be different), he’s going to have a hard time generating the sort of grass roots enthusiasm that won him the White House in the first place. Progressive Dems won’t switch sides, but some of them will stay home. He may even have trouble getting Shepard Fairey’s endorsement if Afghanistan doesn’t turn around fast.

All this means that Obama will have to devote a lot of time and attention and political capital to the war in Afghanistan, an impoverished land-locked country of modest strategic importance. Meanwhile, life will go on in the rest of the world, and U.S. relations with a number of far more important countries will not receive the attention they should.