According to a new report, the President’s new strategy in Afghanistan could end up turning into a decades-long military and financial burden for the United States:
As the Obama administration expands U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, military experts are warning that the United States is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will probably eclipse that of the Iraq war.
Since the invasion of Afghanistan eight years ago, the United States has spent $223 billion on war-related funding for that country, according to the Congressional Research Service. Aid expenditures, excluding the cost of combat operations, have grown exponentially, from $982 million in 2003 to $9.3 billion last year.
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“We will need a large combat presence for many years to come, and we will probably need a large financial commitment longer than that,” said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the “strategic assessment” team advising McChrystal. The expansion of the Afghan security force that the general will recommend to secure the country “will inevitably cost much more than any imaginable Afghan government is going to be able to afford on its own,” Biddle added.
“Afghan forces will need $4 billion a year for another decade, with a like sum for development,” said Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense and combat Marine who has chronicled the Iraq and Afghan wars. Bing said the danger is that Congress is “so generous in support of our own forces today, it may not support the aid needed for progress in Afghanistan tomorrow.”
The biggest problem is that the Afghan government simply isn’t equipped to undertake the measures necessary to secure itself, a necessary first step if the country is ever going to be rebuilt:
In a 2008 study that ranked the weakest states in the developing world, the Brookings Institution rated Afghanistan second only to Somalia. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product in 2008 was $23 billion, with about $3 billion coming from opium production, according to the CIA’s World Factbook. Oil-producing Iraq had a GDP of $113 billion.
Afghanistan’s central government takes in roughly $890 million in annual revenue, according to the World Factbook. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has pointed out that Afghanistan’s national budget cannot support the $2 billion needed today for the country’s army and police force.
Dutch Army Brig. Gen. Tom Middendorp, commander of the coalition task force in Afghanistan’s southern Uruzgan province, described the region as virtually prehistoric.
“It’s the poorest province of one of the poorest countries in the world. And if you walk through that province, it’s like walking through the Old Testament,” Middendorp told reporters recently. “There is enormous illiteracy in the province. More than 90 percent cannot write or read. So it’s very basic, what you do there. And they have had 30 years of conflict.”
As a result, the United States is on the verge of signing on to a military and financial commitment that has no foreseeable end, and that’s without taking into account the unknowable, such as potential Taliban comebacks in various parts of the country that require direct American intervention. More importantly, though, it calls into question just what our strategy should be at this point:
We went into the country initially to capture and destroy the elements of al Qaeda that had launched the September 11th attacks. By and large, that mission was accomplished long ago and the remaining elements of al Qaeda have been reduced to hiding in the northern provinces of Pakistan and smuggling audio tapes of someone who may or may not be Osama bin Laden to Al Jazeera on a semi-occasional basis.
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If destroying al Qaeda is the goal, as the President has said, then why aren’t we fighting them where they actually are ?
If it’s not, then what are we still doing there ?
So far, nobody seems to be asking those questions. Its time we started.
