President-elect Obama’s plan to remove U.S. forces from Iraq and focus instead on Afghanistan may not save the $10 billion a month he has mentioned in campaign speeches.

He is counting on some savings from a drawdown in Iraq to pay for other initiatives he has proposed.

While it is true that the United States spends that much in Iraq, drawing down U.S. forces there and shifting some of them to Afghanistan may require substantial outlays of funds, according to analysts speaking at a Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) teleconference last week. CFR is a Washington think tank. Instead of a token force, perhaps 100,000 Western forces would be required on a sustained, indefinite basis to stabilize Afghanistan.

But moving large numbers of U.S. forces to Afghanistan first would require huge investments in infrastructure and logistics, such as fuel and other depots, and establishment of major roadway logistics supply routes, which now are mainly through troubled Pakistan. Relying solely on air supply would be impractical and hugely expensive. And a larger U.S. presence in Afghanistan would first require a large number of helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, housing and much more.

The prospect of shifting some U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and then shifting all of the security work onto indigenous Afghan forces, just won’t work, the analysts said.

Afghanistan is economically incapable of paying and supporting the 300,000 to 500,000 native fighters that would be required to stabilize the situation and neutralize Taliban forces, the analysts explained.

Of course, large nations such as the United States and NATO countries could be asked for funds to support such a force, and would, so long as the fight against the Taliban continued. But once that fight were won, then what? Other nations would tire of that huge financial burden. This would be the curse of success.

And while Obama extols the value of negotiating with enemies, there is no prospect of a peace deal with the Taliban any time soon, because it and other rogue groups are stronger than the weak state forces in Afghanistan.

Further, a much bigger problem that Obama must confront lies next door, in Pakistan, a state possessing nuclear-tipped missiles that could be destabilized by al Qaeda terrorist forces which have their headquarters there, and by others threatening the government in Islamabad.

The teleconference featured Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy, and Daniel Markey, senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia, both of them with the CFR, presided over by Robert McMahon, deputy editor of CFR.org on the Web.

The vision of a low-cost way of resolving the problem in Afghanistan likely is a mirage, Biddle said.

Ideally, "What we really need to do is build up the Afghan security forces, hand the problem off, and then gradually build down our presence in the longer term," Biddle said. But that won’t work in reality, he explained: "That recipe would work if there was a plausible chance that the Afghan economy could support the kind of Afghan security forces that will be necessary in order to secure their own population. And I can’t see how they’re ever going to be able to do that."

Therefore, Obama faces "some serious downstream challenges for allied strategy in theater," even though the major security challenges are confined to the southeastern portions of Afghanistan.

"Even if you just look at the south and the east, the kind of scale of security effort you would need in order to protect those populations is probably [beyond] the long-term ability of any plausible Afghan state to support."

That means U.S. and other western forces would have to remain in Afghanistan for a long time, rather than withdrawing to provide a major cost savings.

Similarly, trying to use tribal forces to fill the power vacuum of weak Afghani forces can backfire, with a need later to rein in those tribal forces and reassert central power. Further, Taliban forces are hardened and brutal, and have slaughtered tribal units.

And in Iraq, it is unlikely that most or all U.S. forces could be withdrawn soon, because at the moment Iraq suffers a still perilous condition of cease-fire and security levels, Biddle said.