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One of the many large U.S. military bases in Iraq, Forward Operating Base Remagen is seen in a photo relased by the U.S. military in March 2006.

Measured in blood, the price tag in Iraq is absolute: 4,238 Americans have died during America’s six-year war. For Iraqis, the toll is far greater. Icasualties.org, which tracks body counts reported by the media, notes nearly 45,000 civilians have been killed since Iraq’s Shiite-led government was formed in April 2005; another Web site puts the tally since 2003 close to 100,000.

Yet as the Pentagon prepares its exit strategy in line with President Barack Obama’s announced plans to end the war by 2012, a wholly different calculus is emerging. With the end of combat rhetorically on the horizon, the cost of leaving is now measured in financial, logistical and, above all, political terms.

Obama told Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C., that while the United States would leave Iraq “sovereign, stable and self-reliant,” the price of staying had become too great. “What we will not do is let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals,” the president said. “We cannot sustain indefinitely a commitment that has put a strain on our military and will cost the American people nearly a trillion dollars.”

But if the mission has been expensive, the price of withdrawal is no zero-sum game.

The United States has spent some $939 billion in combined operations since 2001, and the Obama administration has requested an additional $130 billion to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan next year (on top of the $75.5 billion the administration requested for the remainder of 2009).

How much more it might need is pure guesswork. If Obama sticks to his threshold limit of 50,000 American trainers in Iraq after combat ends — which the president says will happen by August 31, 2010 — the United States could have as many as 80,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2011. Getting them out will cost billions.

According to a January 2009 assessment by the Congressional Budget Office, a combined 30,000 troops in the two war zones could cost $388 billion in additional expenditures through 2019. Bump that up to 75,000 troops, and U.S. taxpayers could shoulder an additional $867 billion before the decade is out — on top of what has already been spent.

Getting the troops home will take time as well as money. Back in 2007, military officials told the Baltimore Sun departing could take nearly two years to complete.

Janet St. Laurent, a defense expert with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, told lawmakers last month that as of November 2008 there were 286 U.S. installations in Iraq that would need closing. Shuttering even the smallest of these will take upwards of two months, she said, while closing installations like Balad Air Force Base — which houses about 24,000 troops and their support staff — could take “longer than 18 months.”

Obama’s new Iraq timeline roughly splits the difference between the 16 months he promised as a candidate and the 23-month timeline favored by some commanders. Some analysts question whether the United States can afford to leave as soon as Obama has suggested.

Stephen Biddle, CFR’s senior fellow for defense policy, says he would have preferred a slower drawdown to maintain the peace between Iraq’s political rivals; he told lawmakers in February that repositioning forces to Afghanistan could leave the United States vulnerable in the event of a downward spiral in Iraq.

Iraqi politicians are equally concerned. Sunni leaders fear clashes with Shiite factions once U.S. troops leave, and others say Arab-Kurdish violence is likely in the power vacuum.

Aware of the risks, the White House has made no firm plans beyond the August 2010 date. Some analysts suggest a substantial contingent of troops should stay at least through national elections in December, a scenario Defense Secretary Robert Gates says is plausible.

On March 2, the Pentagon announced a new brigade rotation to Iraq, meaning force numbers there will stay constant in the near term. And as author and military analyst Tomas E. Ricks writes on his blog, these moves suggest Obama understands that war doesn’t end with a speech, a costly lesson the Bush administration learned the hard way.

Supporters of the Pakistan Muslim League (N) chant slogans during a protest against the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore

LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) – Pakistani investigators were following “important leads” to identify who was behind the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Wednesday.

The ambush in broad daylight, and the apparent ease with which around a dozen gunmen escaped after a firefight with police of almost 30 minutes, sent shudders through a world fearful of nuclear-armed Pakistan’s inability to contain rising militancy.  “We also have some important leads that would eventually unearth people responsible for this terrible act,” Qureshi told a news conference with his Sri Lankan counterpart in Islamabad.

Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama said this was the first attack on its nationals outside the country and he did not rule out possibility that the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) movement was involved.

Desperate for leads, police rounded up scores of people without establishing any link, according to officials, although one mid-level officer in the probe told Reuters a cellphone had been found that led to the arrest of at least one real suspect.

Seven Pakistanis, including six police and the driver of a bus carrying match officials, were killed in Tuesday’s attack on the Sri Lankan team as it was being driven to the Gadaffi Stadium for the third day of a match against Pakistan.

Six Sri Lankan players were wounded along with two team officials, including a British assistant coach. They flew back to Colombo along with the rest of the tour party on Tuesday night.

“SITTING DUCKS”

ICC match referee Chris Broad told a news conference in London he and other match officials had been left like “sitting ducks” by a lack of security.

The Punjab government has offered a reward of around $125,000 for information on the attackers, who were armed with AK 47s, hand grenades and rocket propelled grenades.

Television footage showed gunmen wearing track suits and trainers and shalwar kameez, traditional long shirt and baggy pants. Some appeared to be barely 20 years old.

They appeared to leave the scene of the attack quite calmly, walking and on motor cycles.

Pakistan has reeled under a wave of bomb and gun attacks in recent years, mostly carried out by Islamist militants linked to the Taliban or al Qaeda, but arch nationalists would relish a link being found between rival India and the Lahore attack.

Pakistan’s pro-West President Asif Ali Zardari wrote in a column for the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that the “terrorist attack against the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore shows once again the evil we are confronting.”

The targeting of a visiting cricket team from a friendly country stunned Pakistanis whose love of the sport only comes second to religion in terms of forging a spirit of unity.

The reverberations were felt across the cricketing world and beyond, with U.S. President Barack Obama expressing deep concern.

U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller held talks with Pakistani officials in Islamabad on Wednesday to follow up on the probe into the Mumbai attacks, having already met with Indian officials in New Delhi.

The United States wants Pakistan focused on fighting terrorism, but there are fears Zardari’s civilian government could be engulfed by crises less than a year after taking power.

Aside from militancy radiating across the northwest from the borders with Afghanistan, Pakistan desperately needs billions of dollars of aid to supplement a bailout by the International Monetary Fund last November.

Elections to parliament’s upper house, the Senate, were held on Wednesday under the shadow of a political crisis that sparked street agitation in the past week and sent share prices tumbling.

But the Karachi index bounced nearly 4 percent by Wednesday afternoon thanks to support buying from state-run institutions.

POSSIBLE SUSPECTS

There is a long list of possible suspects for the attack in Lahore. The Tamil Tigers are close to defeat in northern Sri Lanka and have a history of deadly guerrilla attacks.

“LTTE definitely, we believe have outside links and international connections to other terrorist organizations but these are matters that we cannot discuss in the open,” Bogollagama said.

Speculation has otherwise focused largely on two Pakistani jihadi groups — Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Laskhar-Jhangvi (LeJ), as well as the Pakistani Taliban.

LeJ, a Sunni Muslim group, is regarded as a cat’s paw for al Qaeda in Pakistan and has been linked to several high-profile strikes including the suicide truck bomb attack that killed 55 people at Islamabad’s Marriott hotel last September.

Pakistan has arrested a few LeT members after India and the United States said the group was responsible for the slaughter of about 170 people by gunmen in the Indian city of Mumbai last November. The group is also said to have some links to al Qaeda.

Formed to fight Indian rule in Kashmir, LeT has had good relations with Pakistani intelligence agencies in the past, and there is pressure on Pakistan to cut any remaining jihadi ties.

Several observers noted some similarities between the Lahore and Mumbai attacks.

Mexican soldiers patrol an industrial area of the border city of Ciudad Juarez March 3, 2009.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) – Hundreds of heavily armed soldiers fanned out across Mexico’s bloodiest drug war city on Tuesday, trying to prevent a collapse in law and order just south of the U.S. border.

Sirens blared as the army staged one of its biggest troop build-ups in years in Ciudad Juarez, a desert city across the border from El Paso, Texas, where near-daily clashes between drug gangs and police have terrified residents.

Infamous in the 1990s for the unsolved murders of hundreds of women, Ciudad Juarez is now engulfed in the worst drug violence in Mexico as cartels in league with corrupt cops fight over one of the country’s most profitable smuggling routes.

More than 2,000 people have been murdered in the area over the past year and drug gang hitmen showed their power last month by forcing the city’s police chief to resign with a threat to keep killing police officers until he quit.

“We’ve got to show we can achieve security in Juarez, for Mexico’s sake, for its economy, for people’s lives, for our international reputation,” said Victor Valencia, the Chihuahua state governor’s representative in Ciudad Juarez.

Ciudad Juarez is prized for its location smack in the middle of the 2,000 mile border with road and rail links deep into the United States. The Pacific-coast Sinaloa gang, led by top fugitive Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, is one of several fighting for control of the city.

Mexico’s police forces are tainted up to the highest levels by corruption and direct links to the drug cartels, and President Felipe Calderon has staked his reputation on a nationwide army-led crackdown on cartels.

Ciudad Juarez is now the most crucial battleground of a war that killed more than 6,000 people across Mexico last year and is scaring off investors in cities near the border.

“The solution is with the military. The federal, state and municipal police are infiltrated by organized crime,” Valencia told Reuters.

The army expects to have 7,500 soldiers and federal police stationed in Ciudad Juarez by the end of the week, with a further 2,000 troops in the rest of Chihuahua state. Six local bishops pleaded in newspaper ads this week for an end to the killings that are “staining the state with blood”.

Troops rolled past U.S.-style shopping malls in Ciudad Juarez on Tuesday to set up checkpoints at bridges running over the border and at the city’s international airport, briefly shut last week after bomb threats.

GANGS PILE IN

Calderon has about 45,000 soldiers across Mexico fighting cartels but has never before sent so many troops to one city.

At least four main cartels are fighting for control of Ciudad Juarez, and gangs of unemployed youths have joined the fray to extort businesses, kidnap residents, rob banks and work as hitmen.

Residents fear the city could go the way of Colombia’s Medellin at the height of the drug war there in the 1990s, when murder rates hit 6,000 deaths a year.

Mexican soldiers inspect vehicles at a checkpoint at the Paso del Norte international border crossing in Ciudad Juarez March 3, 2009.

“Juarez is prisoner to an infinity of groups fighting for the territory, and others who are making the most of the confusion for easy money,” said army spokesman Enrique Torres.

Guzman, Mexico’s most-wanted man, wants to seize Ciudad Juarez from local drug boss Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, and officials say the shadowy La Linea cartel from the western state of Michoacan and the feared Zeta hitmen from the Gulf of Mexico cartel are also at war here.  The jump in killings in the city to around 10 a day in February has put Calderon under intense pressure.  Some U.S. officials have publicly asked whether Mexico is becoming a failed state and voiced concern about a spillover of executions, kidnappings and extortions into the United States.

Last month, gunmen killed two city councilmen and forced out Ciudad Juarez’s police chief by killing his deputy and vowing to murder an officer every 48 hours until he stepped down.

A former soldier attacked a convoy carrying Chihuahua’s state governor in what many believe was an attack linked to drugs. Spooked by a series of death threats, the city’s mayor now lives over the border in El Paso.

Ciudad Juarez, which boomed in the U.S. Prohibition era and now bulges with factories making goods for export, has pockets of normality during the day. Cars cram its shabby streets, residents sit in parks or walk their children to school.

But at night, the city once famed for its sex and tequila-fueled party life is ghostlike and residents adopt a self-imposed curfew from dusk till dawn.

“The drug hitmen are in control here. Things are out of control, there’s so much death,” said textile salesman Valente Salazar in Ciudad Juarez’s main square as troops swept past in Humvees. “At six o’clock I go home and I don’t go out at all after that. There are so many killings.”

MOSCOW – President Barack Obama has written to his Russian counterpart suggesting U.S. plans for a missile defense system in Eastern Europe might be unnecessary if Moscow helped in blocking Iran’s progress toward building long-range missiles, senior administration officials said on Tuesday.

Plans for deploying U.S. missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, ostensibly to guard against Iranian attacks on U.S. allies in Europe, are among a host of issues that soured U.S.-Russia relations during the former Bush administration. There have been indications Obama, who has vowed to shake up American foreign policy, might be willing to set aside the missile defense system.

“President Obama sent a letter to Medvedev that covered a broad range of issues, including missile defense and how it relates to the Iranian threat,” one senior administration official said on condition of anonymity to discuss private communications of the president.

“The suggestion is that need for missile defense deployment could become unnecessary if, working together with Russia, the Iran missile threat is addressed,” the official told The Associated Press.

Meeting next month
Obama and Medvedev were expected to meet at the G-20 economic summit of advanced and developing nations in London next month, according to the officials.

They also emphasized that “we will continue to consult with the Czechs and Poles as we move forward with decisions on missile defense.” That message was an obvious attempt to ease fears among those two U.S. allies — former Soviet satellite states — who are deeply invested in the missile defense system as an assurance of American backing against a resurgent Russia.

The administration has previously hinted that the policy on the missile defense shield that former President George B. Bush fiercely advocated was open to reassessment.

The Obama letter was first reported in Tuesday’s editions of The New York Times.

No quid pro quo
In Moscow, Medvedev spokeswoman Nataliya Timakova said that Obama’s letter contained various proposals and assessments, but offered no quid pro quo.

“Obama’s letter contained various proposals and assessments of the current situation,” she said . “But the message did not contain any specific proposals or mutually binding initiatives.”

She further disclosed that Obama’s letter was in response to one from Medvedev and that the Kremlin appreciated the “positive” spirit of Obama’s message.

On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov urged the United States to restore diplomatic relations with Iran, Russian news agencies reported. “This would be an important element in stabilizing the situation in the region,” he said.

Meeting with Clinton on Friday
Lavrov is scheduled to hold talks with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Geneva on Friday in the highest-level meeting between the two nations since Obama took office.

At a February gathering of NATO defense chiefs in Krakow, Poland, Gates said that Washington would review the missile plan “in the context of our relationship with both Poland and the Czech Republic” as well as with NATO and Russia. The language marked a departure from the tone of the Bush administration, which enthusiastically promoted the plan and signed deals last year with Warsaw and Prague.

Gates said that if Moscow really wants to stop the missile shield, it should help eliminate the threat of a missile attack from Iran.

The Obama administration has been vocal about its desire to repair rifts between the U.S. and Russia. In Munich last month, Vice President Joe Biden told a gathering of world leaders, “It’s time to press the reset button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should be working together with Russia.”