The National Security Council is meeting today to discuss our policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Pentagon tells us something important:
The Penatagon says the war in Afghanistan costs about $2 billion a week.
With fifty-two weeks in a year, we are apparently spending $104 billion annually in Afghanistan. In 2010, we spent (pdf) $106.9 billion on education, and $90.9 billion on transportation. The Department of Energy spent $38.3 billion.
However you want to look at our budget priorities, we have to face up to the fact that the annual cost of occupying Afghanistan is roughly the same as the federal annual cost of pubic education. We could double the resources that go to our schools without adding a single dollar of taxes by simply reallocating the money currently being spent in Afghanistan. Probably a better way of diverting the money would be to help people pay for college since there are no freaking jobs for people with high school degrees.
Perhaps he was a little over-the-top when he accused the Republicans of trying to turn America in Pakistan, but Nicholas Kristof noted something important in his Sunday column.
For a country that prides itself on social mobility, where higher education has been a traditional escalator to a better life, cutbacks in access to college are a scandal. G. Jeremiah Ryan, the president of Bergen Community College in New Jersey, tells me that when the college was set up in 1965, two-thirds of the cost of running it was supposed to be covered by state and local governments, and one-third by students. The reality today, Dr. Ryan says, is that students bear 78 percent of the cost.
The New York Times reports that the administration is seriously considering escalating the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Bin-Laden is dead; Karzai’s hopeless; we can declare victory and leave since things aren’t going to get much better if we stay. I hope the sensible people win that argument, starting today in the NSC meeting. We’ve got much better investments to make.
If this was a matter of investment vs return, in relation to other priorities, the military budget as a whole would have to suffer. Unfortunately, the military is its own animal & exists in order to exist, without actual relation to the common good (despite the traditional hype), which is now global.
IOW, no such thing as either sensible or humane military policy, at this point.
The US has become, in essence, a machine of perpetual war. It’s what we are good at. It’s where most of our federal income tax dollars go, when you count all the war-support that is done by “non-defense” agencies. It’s close to being the only manufacturing industry still in the U.S. Our government is organized around it. Our news media are based on this principle.
The only thing that hasn’t happened is that we haven’t actually admitted this to ourselves. We’ve been at war continuously since 1941 but our self-image is still as a “peace-loving” nation.
It would help if we could start changing the language we use to frame the topic. Stop calling Iraq and Afghanistan “Wars” — they aren’t wars, they are occupations. The wars, such as they were, were over quickly. The organized armies that opposed our occupation, such as they were, were vanquished long ago. Now we are trying to occupy countries where the majority wants us out NOW. It would be great if we could get that through our collective thick skulls.
Once you start seeing yourself as an occupier and not an aggrieved party at war, you might start to understand some of the guerilla tactics that are being used against us, instead of just dismissing them as “terrorism”.
The next thing is to stop calling it “defense”. Stealth bombers and bunker busting bombs and chemical weapons like phosphorus aren’t weapons of defense — they are weapons of offense. Replace the word “defense” with “military” everywhere. It makes a big difference in connotation between saying “I’m for a strong defense” and “I’m for a strong military”.
If you can get that far then you can try the last step — stop using the heroic term “defending our country” and be honest. “Defending our low gas prices”, and “defending foreign dictatorships that are friendly to our extremely wealthy business owners” — what we are really doing.
We have so gutted our manufacturing sector with trade agreements, financial shortcuts, and poor quality that the only goods that we can export reliably are US weapons and weapons technology. That industrial policy has already come back to bite us. And there are risks that it could again.
Karzai is not hopeless. He is typical of an American client head of state. Withdrawal of US troops will likely undercut a lot of the support for the Taliban that is nationalist rather than religious. Most Afghanis don’t want a return to religious Taliban rule. And Karzai (or his successors) have enough weaponry that they can prevent a forcible takeover by the part of the Taliban unwilling to share power in a multiparty government.
With bin Laden and Kashmiri gone and al Quaeda priorities focused elsewhere, it is time to leave, leave in an orderly fashion, and leave quickly.
The only question now is how, not whether, we withdraw.
Remember the dire warnings, circa 2006-2007, about what would happen if we withdrew from Iraq? Al Qaeda was going to take over, we were going to telegraph our moves to the enemy, they insurgents would just wait us out, it would be a surrender to terrorists, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
What actually happened? We announced our impending withdrawal and then actually began it, and what happened in Iraq? It changed the situation there for the better. The Sunni Iraqis immediately became utterly disinterested in working with foreign jihadists. The Shiite insurgency transformed itself into an electoral political movement. The population as a whole ceased to see the government as an agent of foreign occupation, and participation in the political process was legitimized. Attacks on our ever-dwindling number of remaining troops plummeted, as it became clear that they didn’t have to be driven out.
All of these positive developments, the accomplishment of which were the goals of our ongoing military operation there, happened not despite the withdrawal, but because of the withdrawal and how it was managed.
We need to withdraw from Afghanistan the same way, and we need to utilize the promise and reality of our exit as tools in our toolbox to achieve the objectives – political reconciliation, an end to the insurgency, the strengthening of the state’s capacity – that the people want to stay are always pointing to as reasons why we can’t leave.
They say we need to wait for the right conditions before we start withdrawing, but those conditions will never come about if we don’t start leaving. It’s only through leaving that there is a chance those conditions will obtain.
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iCasualties.org
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."It’s dramatic how sharp the drop off in casualties was in 2008, the year the SOFA setting a timeline for our withdrawal was signed.
I see. It’s not sensible to leave a war after only a few months (as in Libya). We have to wait for more than a decade (as in Afghanistan).
Leave Libya? How does one leave a country one has never entered?
We’ve been in Afghanistan for 9-1/2 years. For 7 of those years, our troops there were essentially marking time in a condition of strategic drift, while the situation gradually eroded.
If you find anyone arguing in favor of hanging around for 7 years in Afghanistan in such circumstances, you give ’em hell.
In the mean time, starting to leave in slightly less than 2 years after we actually put our eye back on the ball sounds like about the right timeframe to me.