A War Gone Off Track
Over time, Hoh came to the conclusion that the war had gone off track. He was troubled both by the American rationale for fighting in Afghanistan and by the way the war was being fought. As he saw it, the United States was no longer fighting al-Qaeda and global terrorism, but we had gotten sucked into an Afghan quagmire—a civil war between feuding Afghan tribes and warlords. Al-Qaeda’s terrorists had fled to Pakistan or to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond. What was left now, he thought, was a domestic Afghan conflict that pitted urban, secular, educated Afghans in Kabul against the rural, religious, illiterate Pashtun tribes in the south and east. Initially, America had arrived as an ally that ousted a hated Taliban regime. Now, Hoh believed, America was widely perceived as the occupier.
“I believe that the people we are fighting there are fighting us because we are occupying them—not for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al-Qaeda, not because of any fundamental hatred toward the West,” Hoh would later say. “The only reason they’re fighting us is because we are occupying them.”
Within a year, Hoh resigned. “I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan …,” Hoh wrote to the State Department. “My resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end…. We are mortgaging our Nation’s economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come. Success and victory, whatever they may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations. The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory.”
“Rebuild Afghanistan or Rebuild America?… We Cannot Do Both”
Matthew Hoh had put his finger on what the Bush administration ignored and the Obama administration played down—the impact of the Afghan and Iraqi wars on the U.S. economy and the toll they were taking on domestic programs for average Americans.
President Bush sidestepped a guns-vs.-butter debate by never raising taxes to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or for America’s global war against al-Qaeda. The wars have added more than $2 trillion to the U.S. national debt. In Matthew Hoh’s terms, Bush mortgaged the nation’s economy for years to come. Not until the tenth year of the Afghan war, when domestic programs faced severe cutbacks as Congress grappled with the national debt, was there a public clamor for cutting military spending.
Paradoxically, it was President Obama’s first draw-down of U.S. troops in Afghanistan that triggered protests. There was wide public disappointment in June 2011 over Obama’s long-awaited announcement that the initial withdrawal would be just ten thousand U.S. troops by the end of 2011 and twenty-three thousand more by mid-2012.
Both Republican conservatives and Democratic liberals rebelled. In the House of Representatives, they pushed for a faster pullout. To loud applause, Republican Walter Jones of North Carolina declared: “If we’re going to cut programs for children who need milk in the morning, if we’re going to cut programs for seniors who need a sandwich at lunch, if we’re going to cut veterans benefits, then, for God’s sake, let’s bring back our troops from Afghanistan.” The resolution for a faster pullout was beaten—but only very narrowly, by 215–204—a vote that posed a warning for the future.
Out in the country, there were echoes of discontent. The U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a resolution urging an early end to the wars and rechanneling funds from military to domestic programs. Minneapolis mayor R. T. Rybak protested that American cities were being forced to make “deeply painful cuts to the most core services while the defense budget continued to escape scrutiny.” Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa angrily objected: “That we would build bridges in Baghdad and Kandahar and not Baltimore and Kansas City absolutely boggles the mind.” During the Senate’s partisan wrangling over the debt ceiling, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin III remonstrated: “We can no longer, in good conscience, cut services and programs at home, raise taxes or—and this is very important—lift the debt ceiling in order to fund nation-building in Afghanistan. The question the president faces—we all face—is quite simple: Will we choose to rebuild America or Afghanistan? In light of our nation’s fiscal peril, we cannot do both.”
War Costs Will Total $4 Trillion
What had pushed the guns-vs.-butter debate to the front burner was uneasiness at the staggering costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a growing awareness that they were fueling the national debt because they had not been paid for.
Congress has directly appropriated $1.4 trillion in funds earmarked for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from September 11, 2001, through 2012, but those figures vastly understate the total costs. They leave out $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion of increases in other war-related spending and national security costs supporting the two wars and the war on terrorism.
From government budget documents, the Eisenhower Study Group, a team of scholars at Brown and Boston Universities, totaled the costs of the war through fiscal year 2015 this way:
$1.430 trillion — Direct war appropriations through fiscal year 2012
326 billion — Additions to Pentagon base budget, indirectly supporting wars
185 billion — Interest on Pentagon borrowing for war appropriations
864 billion — War-related foreign aid assistance through fiscal year 2012
33 billion — Veterans’ medical and disability payments and expenses
401 billion — Department of Homeland Security
$2.461 trillion — Total war costs through FY 2012
168 billion — Projected war appropriations through fiscal year 2015
589 billion — Guaranteed lifetime health and disability care for 2.2 million veterans of the two wars through fiscal year 2051
295 billion — Projected social costs to veterans and their families
$3.513 trillion — Total projected costs and obligations
The Eisenhower Study Group called the $3.5 trillion figure a conservative estimate. A more realistic “moderate” estimate, they said, would be $4.4 trillion.
All those costs represent deficit spending, added to the national debt and far, far above the forecasts of the Bush administration, which suggested the two wars would be short and cheap. Bush’s budget director, Mitch Daniels, estimated the Iraqi war costs at $50–$60 billion. Bush fired his top economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, for telling a reporter that the Iraq war might cost from $100 billion to $200 billion. The Pentagon estimated the Afghan war would cost $1 billion a month, or $120 billion over ten years.
The Perils of “Mission Creep”
The costs skyrocketed because both wars lasted much longer than the Bush administration expected—and as policy experts remind us, they lasted longer for two reasons.
One was Bush’s decision not to raise taxes to finance the wars—a decision attacked by conservatives as well as liberals. Wars that are unpaid for last longer, according to Bruce Bartlett, a former high Republican official in the Reagan and first Bush presidencies. “History shows that wars financed heavily by higher taxes, such as the Korean War and the first Gulf War [1991], end quickly, while those financed largely by deficits, such as the Vietnam War and current Middle East conflicts [Iraq and Afghanistan], tend to drag on indefinitely,” Bartlett wrote. Cato Institute researchers William Niskanen and Benjamin Friedman said unfunded wars drag on because “deficit financing sends war bills to future taxpayers…. The effect is to make war feel cheaper….”
The other main reason that wars drag on is what generals call “mission creep”—U.S. forces are sent in with a narrow mission and that evolves over time into a much more ambitious and costly mission. In Iraq, the mission was to overthrow Saddam Hussein and to find and destroy his weapons of mass destruction. When there were no such weapons, the mission shifted to building Iraqi democracy.
In Afghanistan, America’s initial goal was to avenge the terrorist attack of 9/11 and to disrupt, dismantle, and decapitate
al-Qaeda by destroying its Afghan bases and killing Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. “The mission is to bring al-Qaeda to justice and to make sure Afghanistan no longer serves as a haven for terrorists,” President Bush asserted on November 26, 2001.
Bush emphasized that he did not want to get drawn into a protracted guerrilla war. Soon after the first U.S. attacks against al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, a reporter asked him how the United States was going to avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like quagmire.
“We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam,” Bush replied. “Perhaps the most important lesson that I learned is that you cannot fight a guerrilla war with conventional forces.” In his 2000 campaign, Bush declared his aversion to nation building and chided President Clinton for peacekeeping and democracy-building missions abroad. As president, in July 2001, Bush underscored the point that he “thought that our military should be used to fight and win wars…. And that I was concerned … about how we use our troops for nation-building exercises, which I have rebuffed as a, basically rebuffed as a kind of a strategy for the military.”
But once al-Qaeda had been routed, the Taliban regime in Kabul had been overthrown, and bin Laden had fled into Pakistan, Bush widened his objectives. In April 2002, the president proclaimed a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan. “We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations,” Bush declared. He ticked off an ambitious agenda for nation building. “Peace will be achieved,” he said, “by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government … train and develop its own national army … [build] an education system for boys and girls which works. We’re working hard in Afghanistan. We’re clearing minefields. We’re rebuilding roads. We’re improving medical care. And we will work to help Afghanistan to develop an economy that can feed its people without feeding the world’s demand for drugs.”
Then in 2003, as Bush plunged America into war in Iraq, he shifted resources away from Afghanistan, but he still spoke glowingly about “Afghanistan’s journey to democracy and peace.” At a White House meeting with Afghan president Hamid Karzai in June 2004, Bush emphasized America’s “ironclad commitment to help Afghanistan succeed and prosper.”
From “Counterterrorism” to “Counterinsurgency”
The mission creep was not merely rhetorical. As the president changed his stance, America’s military objectives morphed into new ones. Al-Qaeda, once in the Pentagon’s bull’s-eye in Afghanistan, faded. By 2006 if not earlier, al-Qaeda and its Arab recruits had for all practical purposes disappeared from Afghanistan, according to General David McKiernan, the U.S. commander there. Al-Qaeda had found better, safer havens in Pakistan and was able to mount attacks against the West from other bases around the world. So the original rationale for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, which had made sense and had strong popular support, had become defunct.
The Pentagon simply shifted gears. Following the president’s lead, the nation’s military leaders took on the immense mission of nation building in Afghanistan. To Robert Blackwill, Bush’s deputy national security adviser during 2003–2004, that shift was a strategic blunder. “The mistaken mission creep in Afghanistan during the Bush years was moving from counterterrorism after 9/11—to destroy al-Qaeda—to nation building …,” said Blackwill. “Given the history and culture of Afghanistan, that was always many bridges too far.”
In the lexicon of national security, as Blackwill observed, the White House and the generals slipped from a “counterterrorism strategy” to a “counterinsurgency strategy.” They are very different. Counterterrorism targets the terrorist network, using small operations by highly trained forces such as the Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden. In the past five years, its main field of operations has been outside of Afghanistan. Its primary weapons have been drones operating over the tribal areas of Pakistan or Yemen.
Counterinsurgency is far broader and much more expensive. It involves taking on the full range of tribal forces allied with the Taliban. It means pacifying an entire vast mountainous country and simultaneously trying to create an effective national army and police and to establish a stable Afghan government. It takes much longer than counterterrorism and requires much larger forces and much more foreign development aid.
Counterinsurgency is precisely the kind of complicated, long-term nation building that Bush had once so staunchly opposed. But by the end of his term, President Bush had switched. He enshrined an open-ended U.S. commitment to Afghanistan. “We have a strategic interest and I believe a moral interest in a prosperous and peaceful democratic Afghanistan. And no matter how long it takes,” Bush vowed, “we will help the people of Afghanistan succeed.”
Obama Expands the Afghan War
The Pentagon’s push to keep expanding the U.S. mission in Afghanistan found new momentum under President Obama. True to his campaign promises in 2008, Obama moved to reduce and withdraw all U.S. combat forces from Iraq. But denying Afghanistan as a potential future base for terrorists had long been his priority, and two months into his term, Obama committed twenty-one thousand more troops to Afghanistan. Even before they arrived, Obama was under intense pressure from General Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and the top Pentagon brass to send yet another forty thousand troops. Failure to send in more troops and stop a “deteriorating” war situation, McChrystal warned Obama in August 2009, “risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”
McChrystal had put the squeeze on the new president by framing a dilemma: Go in deeper or risk losing. His stated goal of defeating the Taliban represented mission leap—not creep, but leap. Until then, the more modest U.S. goal had been to “disrupt and dismantle” the Taliban. Defeat was setting the bar higher, sharpening the imperative for more troops and more years in Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted defeat written into Obama’s official orders to McChrystal.
That quickly became a bone of contention in heated internal policy debates. In the end, Obama and his national security advisers rejected the “defeat” language. Obama’s final orders were for the military to “degrade” the Taliban insurgency and to “deny [the Taliban] the ability to overthrow the Afghan government.” In short, block the enemy, but you don’t have to crush them. Nonetheless, Obama did agree to send thirty thousand more troops, meaning that in his first year he had more than doubled the U.S. fighting force in Afghanistan.
Just over a year later, in January 2011, General David Petraeus, the new U.S. Afghan commander, reported that the American troop surge had given U.S. and NATO forces the military initiative and had thrown the Taliban on the defensive. NATO coalition and Afghan forces had “inflicted enormous losses” on the Taliban in the past year, Petraeus said, and “took away some of their most important safe havens.” In mid-2011, Petraeus reported a modest decline in Taliban attacks from the peak levels of 2010. The ultimate goal of leaving the Afghans able to provide for their own security, Petraeus said optimistically, was “very hard, but it is doable.”
Afghanistan and Vietnam: Déjà Vu All Over Again
As the Afghan war dragged on, longtime counterinsurgency experts saw pregnant parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the fateful U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Rufus Phillips, who had headed the U.S. civilian counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam in the early 1960s, went to Afghanistan on an official mission in mid-2009 and came home to write an essay titled “Déjà Vu All Over Again.” The war estimates of Generals Petraeus and McChrystal bore echoes of the rosy military assessments in Vietnam. U.S. commanders seemed in both wars to focus more on enemy casualties and body counts, on territory won or lost, than on the political dimensions of the conflict, which in Vietnam ultimately undid the American cause.
Of course, history does not literally repeat itself, but as Mark Twain reportedly quipped, “It rhymes.” As Rufus Phillips saw it, the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, as in
Vietnam, might appear to be going well, but the Afghan government, like the Vietnamese, was weak, corrupt, and disliked; its national police force was inept and unreliable; and out in the rural homeland of the insurgency, Afghans, like the Vietnamese, felt little connection with the government in Kabul. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, whom I had met in Vietnam in 1963 and who was running the U.S. civilian counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan for the Obama administration, told me in late 2010 that he, too, saw worrisome parallels between the two wars.
There is good reason to look at the Vietnam and Afghan wars in tandem because of their economic impact on America at home. Over the past seven decades, the United States has girded for security threats in Europe and now in the Pacific, but it is actually in the Arc of Danger, stretching from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Somalia to Indochina, that the United States has spent heavily in blood and treasure. This volatile region, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates would warn as he ended his tour, is where the projection of our military power has mired us in long, expensive wars whose economic and political costs have outweighed whatever they might have added to our long-term national security.
In each war, American leaders cast the struggle in grand terms, as a critical battle in a global Armageddon. The White House and Congress in the 1960s insisted that Vietnam was the linchpin of security in Asia. If Vietnam fell, policy makers insisted, other dominoes would fall—Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Southeast Asia. America itself would be threatened. Eventually Vietnam fell, but the disaster never happened. More recently, Saddam Hussein in Iraq was portrayed as a mortal nuclear threat, but that turned out to be false. Now, in Afghanistan, we are said to be fighting the decisive battle against Islamic terrorism, but in fact, al-Qaeda was largely routed six years ago and Islamic jihadists have shifted their operating bases to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or the Internet.
Who Stole the American Dream? Page 37
