The argument over how many troops Obama should send to Afghanistan has largely been distilled to an argument of scale instead of strategy by much of the media. Numbers like 40,000 or 10,000 have come to represent simply how gung-ho a commentator is about the war in Afghanistan. It's easy to forget that there are fundamentally different tasks that these troop levels will, in theory, allow US forces to accomplish.

NYT Military Analyst Elisabeth Bumiller explains what these numbers will actually mean once boots hit the ground:

Should President Obama decide to send 40,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan, the most ambitious plan under consideration at the White House, the military would have enormous flexibility to deploy as many as 15,000 troops to the Taliban center of gravity in the south, 5,000 to the critical eastern border with Pakistan and 10,000 as trainers for the Afghan security forces.

If Mr. Obama limited any additional American troops to 10,000 to 15,000, the military would deploy them largely as trainers, with some reinforcements likely in the southern province of Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual home. The neighboring, and opium-rich, Helmand Province and the eastern border with Pakistan, military analysts say, would receive few if any American troops and would remain largely as they are today.

Check out the full article here.