In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, as former U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry repeatedly warned the White House and State Department, the war is more political than military, more about winning “the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people than about military firepower and kill ratios. Both were guerrilla wars in which the awesome technology of the U.S. military has provided only modest advantages. In Vietnam, and now again in Afghanistan, most American policy makers have focused on the enemy’s ideology, but as Matthew Hoh observed, they have underestimated nationalism as the unifying motivator for the other side—the simple but unquenchable drive for national independence and for expelling the outsiders.
In both wars, the American cause has been crippled by corrupt governments that failed to rally the loyalty of their people. In each case, the United States has invested heavily to build an effective indigenous army and police, but the local forces have been riddled with defections and often unwilling to fight. Their weakness has forced the American military to take the lead, but that has only deepened the gulf between the local government and its people, by making it look like a puppet. Moreover, the high U.S. military profile has left a burning popular resentment when America’s high-tech weaponry has caused civilian casualties, as President Hamid Karzai has often complained.
The “Good War” Gone Bad
To a majority of Americans, including those such as President Obama who disagreed with the war in Iraq, the military campaign to dislodge al-Qaeda from Afghanistan was justified. But as mission creep moved American forces into nation building, the downside emerged: Afghanistan’s weak and mercurial leadership; rising tensions and violence between Afghan and American forces; and President Karzai’s frequent and often blistering denunciations of the American war effort.
Over time, some American officials have become disillusioned with Karzai, especially after the massive ballot stuffing and election fraud cast a shadow of illegitimacy over Karzai’s reelection in August 2009. Ambassador Eikenberry was so mistrustful of Karzai’s reliability that he warned President Obama that reinforcing U.S. troops would probably be futile unless the Karzai government could curb rampant corruption, show stronger leadership, and muster public support.
Although the United States has spent $6 billion since 2002 in building the Afghan army and the national police to take over security in 2014, as U.S. and NATO combat troops are scheduled to depart, the reliability of those forces is questionable. Crooked Afghan cops have been reported selling arms and ammunition to the Taliban. Desertions and resignations from the police have been estimated at 47 percent or more.
While the Afghan army has grown more rapidly, only a tiny fraction of its recruits—just 1.5 percent—have come from southeastern Afghanistan, the heartland of the Taliban, home to roughly five million of the country’s thirty million people. Afghan loyalties are a looming question mark. While some U.S. officers praise certain Afghan military units, others are alarmed that Afghan soldiers have been turning their weapons against U.S. and other NATO forces. Initially, these killings were dismissed as isolated incidents. But in early 2012, one classified U.S. military report said killings of allied soldiers “reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat” among Afghan recruits. A New York Times reporter who obtained that report pointed to the killings of U.S. GIs by Afghan soldiers as “the most visible symptom of a far deeper ailment plaguing the war effort: the contempt each side holds for the other, never mind the Taliban. The ill will and mistrust run deep among civilians and militaries on both sides….”
That mistrust sharpened acutely in the spring of 2012 after a video circulated showing U.S. Marines urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban fighters and after NATO forces mistakenly burned Korans near Bagram Air Base. Two dozen Afghans were killed in clashes with NATO military forces during bloody protests in several Afghan cities over the Koran burnings, and two U.S. advisory officers were killed inside the heavily guarded Afghan Interior ministry. But the most inflammatory incident was an apparently unprovoked killing rampage by an American Army sergeant, who allegedly murdered sixteen villagers in their homes in southern Afghanistan. In Washington, the string of explosive episodes heightened talk of accelerating the U.S. military withdrawal. In Kabul, President Karzai responded to widespread public anger by pressing the U.S. to pull back from rural operations and to confine its troops to military bases by 2013. Officials in both countries feared that the new tensions played into the hands of the Taliban insurgency.
“People are still kind of under the spell of the Taliban,” asserted Dr. Mahmood Khan, a member of parliament from Kandahar. “They believe it is not only stronger than the government, but that their intelligence is stronger. They can find out very soon if your son or brother is serving in the army.” The Taliban are reported to have beheaded army recruits and recruited others.
Friendly Afghans warn Americans not to be deceived by appearances of cooperation. “I can tell you this very clearly,” Munshi Abdul Majid, governor of Baghlan Province, told a Washington Post reporter: “50 percent of the people working with the Afghan government, their hearts are with the Taliban.” Muhammad Mohaqeq, a former tribal warlord and current member of parliament, said ominously in late 2011: “The Taliban are coming back. They have deeply infiltrated the Afghan forces, the police and the army. Security is getting worse as the Taliban are getting stronger.”
The Warning from Bob Gates
Although Defense Secretary Robert Gates steadfastly promoted the broad counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and spoke confidently about the American war effort there, on the verge of his retirement from the Pentagon in 2011, Gates vented his frustration at waging war in the Arc of Danger.
“I must tell you, when it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect,” Gates quipped puckishly in a speech to West Point cadets. “We have never once gotten it right, from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more—we had no idea a year before any of these missions that we would be so engaged.”
Then, Gates soberly underscored the grave risks of committing large U.S. forces to guerrilla wars and nation building. “In my opinion,” Gates said, “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
America’s Global Footprint: An “Empire of Bases”
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq epitomize America’s global military footprint. We Americans don’t like to think of our country as an empire, but, as the Pentagon’s own figures confirm, our military forces have an imperial reach that girdles the globe. Unlike Great Britain, France, or Spain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we have not built an empire of overseas colonies, with some notable exceptions such as the Philippines and Puerto Rico.
But the United States has been driven by a sense of manifest destiny to carry our concept of freedom and democracy across the world and to fight when we see liberty—or our lanes of commerce—threatened. We did not covet territory per se. Instead, as Professor Chalmers Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley observed, America chose a politically more expedient and cost-efficient strategy for projecting its power. The United States developed what Johnson called an “Empire of Bases” that circled the globe.
America’s military imperium has become so natural to us and so embedded in the structure of global power that by the end of 2011, nearing seven decades after the end of World War II and more than two decades after the close of the Cold War, the United States still had more than 580,000 personnel—in uniform or defense contractors—stationed in fifty-seven countries.
The magnitude of America’s worldwide network of bases is stunning. The Pentagon’s “Base Structure Report” in 2011 listed 611 U.S. overseas military sites, not counting those in hot war zones—then 411 in Afghanistan, 88 in Iraq, and half a dozen in Ku
wait. Nor did it count another half dozen bases in Saudi Arabia or U.S. covert facilities in Pakistan used for drone missions against al-Qaeda. Even subtracting family housing complexes, schools, resort hotels, and golf courses (the Pentagon owns 172 golf courses), there are more than 1,000 overseas U.S. military installations.
“No other military in world history has been deployed as widely as that of the United States,” the conservative Heritage Foundation reported. Simply maintaining those bases in 2010 cost $41.6 billion, not counting the costs of troops stationed overseas or new construction, according to Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Dorothy Robyn.
America’s omnipresent global footprint today is a legacy of the Cold War. The global menace of Soviet-led communism was its rationale. The United States built a system of deterrence through alliances with NATO in Europe, SEATO in Southeast Asia, CENTO in the Middle East, and special defense links to Japan and South Korea in the Far East. Every region, every country, every civil war, every coup d’état, every nascent threat, became a potential trip wire for U.S. involvement.
From Harry Truman to George W. Bush, America’s leaders gauged U.S. national interests as broadly as the rulers of ancient Rome. Economist Joseph Schumpeter’s description of the Roman Empire resonates vividly today: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.”
The Mismatch: Projecting Military Power on Waning Economic Power
The Cold War rationale for America’s universal military presence largely disappeared with the collapse of the USSR and its Warsaw Pact alliance in the early 1990s, as many foreign policy experts have noted. Nonetheless, the United States maintains eighty thousand troops in Europe. When former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld made plans to bring seventy thousand troops home from Europe and elsewhere, regional military commanders blocked him.
Whatever the new threats from terrorism, our “Empire of Bases” remains in place largely because both political and military leaders today echo the Cold War mind-set, the notion that the United States is the global policeman, whether protecting Bosnian Muslims, invading Iraq, or helping to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. “America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation,” President Clinton proclaimed in 1997. In 2005, President Bush tied America’s security not to military threats, but to spreading democracy around the world. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands …,” Bush declared. “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.”
In its defense doctrine, the Bush administration held that U.S. power alone was crucial to global order. It stipulated that the United States would act—preemptively, if necessary—to halt the rise of potential challengers in any corner of the world. More modestly, but still with sweeping implications, President Obama observed that “more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security over six decades….” But later, in his Nobel Peace Prize address, he injected a note of caution. “America’s commitment to global security will never waver,” Obama vowed. Then he added that “in a world in which threats are more diffuse and missions more complex, America cannot act alone. America alone cannot secure the peace.”
Obama’s subtext was the economic limits to American power: The United States could no longer afford a universal military role.
In its prime, coming out of World War II, the United States dominated the global economy. With a monopoly of atomic weapons, ninety-five military divisions, a blue-water navy of twelve hundred major warships, and more than two thousand heavy bombers, it had the means to enforce Pax Americana worldwide. But by the early 1970s, America’s economic ebb tide had begun. With the nation’s first trade deficit in 1971, President Nixon tacitly acknowledged a more limited U.S. role by devaluing the dollar and suspending its convertibility into gold. In the 1970s, with U.S. domestic oil production in irreversible decline and foreign oil suppliers jacking up prices, Americans personally experienced the U.S. economic vulnerability—a punishing 40 percent spike in gasoline prices and long lines at filling stations.
President Jimmy Carter tried to preach austerity, but Ronald Reagan told Americans to “go for the gold” and keep consuming. He mounted a massive defense buildup while sharply cutting taxes. “Reagan severed the connection between military spending and all other fiscal or political considerations—a proposition revived by George W. Bush after September 2001,” historian Andrew Bacevich observed.
Bush’s Defense Spending: $200 Billion Higher Than in the Cold War
Spending beyond our means became America’s modus operandi, as illustrated by the nation’s pre-recession global trade deficits of more than $800 billion in 2006 and again in 2007. The years of the Bush presidency brought not only the trillions spent on two new wars, but a doubling of the overall defense budget, which actually ran $200 billion a year higher than at the height of the Cold War, even adjusting for inflation.
With the exploding costs of new weapons and intelligence systems on top of the costs of war, U.S. spending on national security leapt to nearly $1 trillion a year ($993 billion), according to Winslow Wheeler, a veteran analyst of Pentagon spending for Congress and the nonprofit Center for Defense Information. Christopher Preble, another analyst, at the libertarian Cato Institute, as well as some former defense officials calculated that U.S. defense spending was roughly equal to the total of defense expenditures for all the other nations in the world.
“Imperial Overstretch”—the Problem of Empires
The heart of the problem, thoughtful analysts assert, is that America’s defense empire today is the largest and most costly the world has ever known—at a time when the U.S. economy is in deep trouble. This has happened to other nations in other eras—with dire consequences. As historian Paul Kennedy pointed out in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, nations have a pattern of becoming the world’s number one economy and the number one military power and then overreaching with their military ambitions while their economies sputter past their prime.
“It has been a common dilemma facing previous ‘number-one’ countries,” Kennedy wrote, “that even as their relative economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes out productive investment and, over time, leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense.”
Kennedy drew parallels between the United States today and the historical arcs of imperial Spain in 1600 and the British Empire in 1900, in the twilight of their power. Like the two earlier imperial powers, Kennedy observed, the United States “now runs the risk … of what might roughly be called ‘imperial overstretch’: that is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them all simultaneously.”
America’s challenge, Kennedy concluded, is to find a more reasonable balance between its military commitments and trying to “preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the face of the ever-shifting patterns of global production.”
Kennedy wrote that in 1987, when America’s global economic position was stronger than today—making his comments an even more trenchant augury of the current
dangers of America’s excessive global commitments and military spending.
Eisenhower’s Warning
Six decades ago, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of precisely that danger—the danger that the United States, by overspending on defense, would damage its domestic economy, its engine of growth.
Eisenhower, who is remembered for his parting admonition about the excessive political power of the military-industrial complex, had worried earlier in his presidency that the United States was becoming so obsessed with the Soviet threat and its urge to build a network of overseas bases that it risked undermining the nation’s long-term economic security. As Eisenhower put it: “To amass military power without regard to our economic capacity would be to defend ourselves against one kind of disaster by inviting another.”
Eisenhower was explicit about the trade-offs between guns and butter. Making one heavy bomber, he said, meant sacrificing thirty modern schools or two fully equipped hospitals or two electric power plants. “We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people …,” he said. “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Who Stole the American Dream? Page 38
