$700 Billion Later

That doesn’t include all the future veteran pension, healthcare and disability benefits that will linger for decades to come. Yup, it’s the basic cost to the United States government (since 2001) for its involvement in the clearly failed effort in Afghanistan (see below). It doesn’t count the $818 billion cost of other clearly failed military effort – oops there goes another car bomb in Baghdad and another al Qaeda raid against Shiite targets… anywhere – in Iraq, a government that by reason of its overwhelming Shiite population (60%) has effectively turned that country into a political satellite of Shiite-dominated Iran. Austerity? Budget cuts? We don’t have money for schools, infrastructure and the poor? The Bush administration got us woefully into this under-thought mess, and the Obama administration couldn’t figure out how to extract our troops from these unwinnable wars within anything like a reasonable time.

We had the Taliban by the tail early in the engagement (right after our counter in 2001), but instead of finishing the job, we repositioned our troop priorities to Iraq in 2003, allowing the Taliban who gave comfort to the 9/11 al Qaeda attackers to rebuild their power based, reinforce their military capacity and raise money from sympathizers all over the world. They specifically reconfigured their forces and underlying strategy to decimate NATO priorities and begin the long, lingering effort to take down the mega-mega-corrupt Karzai government (which is termed out this year… likely to be replaced by another regime with a need to fill its coffers to mirror the wealth siphoned off by Karzai and his cronies). They might share power with some regional war lords, but it seems that taking down the U.S.-installed government in Kabul is a Taliban priority.

While we struggle in our negotiations with Kabul to leave some NATO forces behind after the bulk of our troops are withdrawn by the end of the year (there are no longer regular parts of the combat forces in the country), an ungrateful Karzai is playing to the Taliban crowd in the hopes of working out some power-sharing arrangement so that his cronies can keep their ill-gotten gains (at least those not exported to Swiss bank accounts).

Why would Americans even want to stay? Oh yeah, we can use bases in Afghanistan to launch our much loved drone strikes against Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan… but mostly in that nefarious tribal district in western  Pakistan, a no-man’s land filled with well-armed, Western-hating terrorists with death and destruction on their mind. And though Pakistan has repeatedly stated that it abhors such anonymous strikes from above, they too are struggling against their own Taliban insurgency.

So how exactly is the “legitimate” Afghan army doing against the Taliban insurgency? Here one of a litany of rolling failures: “Taliban insurgents overran an Afghan National Army base near [Asadabad on the morning of February 23rd], killing 21 soldiers in their bunks in what appeared to be the worst single blow to government forces since 2010, according to both government and insurgent officials.

“President Hamid Karzai ordered an investigation and canceled a planned state visit to Sri Lanka in response to the attack, in the Ghaziabad district of Kunar Province, near the eastern border with Pakistan.

“The attack highlighted the vulnerability of Afghan military units, which are generally no longer accompanied by American or other NATO advisers and do not have the close air support they often enjoyed. And it raised questions about the Afghans’ ability to hold out against the insurgents on their own as the NATO mission winds down and international forces prepare to leave Afghanistan at the end of 2014… At the same time, there were new signals that efforts to start peace talks with the insurgents were foundering.” New York Times, February 24th.

As Chinese troops practice beach landings, sending a clear message to Japan about who really controls the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, Ukraine struggles to replace and regenerate a government in direct contravention of Vladimir Putin’s aspirations for this economically and politically decimated nation, as the civil war in Syria seems unending, as Iran seems to be falling behind on its de-nuclearization pledge, and as riots continue to plague Thailand and Venezuela, it fascinating to watch how little foreign policy matters in the great debates within the United States.

While the Democrats have former Senator/Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden with relevant international expertise, the GOP seems to have zero viable presidential aspirants with any relevant foreign policy experience whatsoever. It’s not an issue that seems to matter to them. All we hear is the sleepwalking-mantra of keeping our military at current or higher levels, notwithstanding the legacy of military failure that has been our overwhelming pattern since the Vietnam War.

But the harsh reality of budget cuts is impacting our military nevertheless: “The Pentagon said on [February 24th] it would shrink the U.S. Army to pre-World War Two levels, eliminate the popular A-10 aircraft and reduce military benefits in order to meet 2015 spending caps, setting up an election-year fight with the Congress over national defense priorities… [Defense Secretary Chuck] Hagel said the Pentagon plans to reduce the size of the Army to between 440,000 and 450,000 soldiers. The Army is currently about 520,000 soldiers and had been planning to draw down to about 490,000 in the coming year.”

Reuters.com, February 25th. Lacking any senior diplomatic stars and relying heavily on a simple military threat, senior GOP members of Congress immediately protested that the United States cannot afford to reduce their armed forces.

If we are going to keep our nation safe in an unpredictable and hostile world, we need more than sophisticated weapon systems to defuse global situations that threaten our food supply, fuel prices and undermine our economic and political goals everywhere. Come on, GOP, we know you can do better! Come on Senate, the world is a tough place so deal with it. And as for you House, you might consider picking up some history books to see the mistakes others have made that you seem destined to repeat.

I’m Peter Dekom, and for a multicultural nation, it seems that we have less of an understanding of global issues than we have had in almost a century.