Welfare queen of Kabul

Juan Cole makes an important point about yesterday's news that the Obama administration wants to double the size of the Afghan army:

... it is hard to see how the Afghan government could afford such a huge security force. It would likely cost several billion dollars a year to maintain, and Afghanistan's whole annual budget is only a little over a billion dollars a year (the gross domestic product is only $9 bn., and a third of that is probably from poppies made into heroin.) These plans doom Afghanistan to be a welfare queen in the world community for decades...

Cole also questions whether it's a good idea to create such a large military in a fractious country like Afghanistan -- whose citizens have historically disliked strong central governments.