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The US has now passed the milestone of ten years involvement in Afghanistan.   Here is a thoughtful analysis of where we are, and the difficulties ahead:   retired Army General Stanley McChrystal speaking  at the Council on Foreign Relations.   He says that the United States began the war in Afghanistan with a “frighteningly simplistic” view of the country and lacks the knowledge to bring the conflict to a successful end.  He also discusses how the US invasion of Iraq harmed the US effort in Afghanistan, both in terms of diluting resources and by changing how the Muslim world perceived American intentions.  Watch the video »

http://youtu.be/zBX_D80_oFQStanley McCrystal on 10th anniversary of US invasion of Afghanistan

America’s costly war machine

Fighting the war on terror compromises the economy now and threatens it in the future.

By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz

September 18, 2011

Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.

Many of these costs were unnecessary. We chose to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with a small, all-volunteer force, and we supplemented the military presence with a heavy reliance on civilian contractors. These decisions not only placed enormous strain on the troops but dramatically pushed up costs. Recent congressional investigations have shown that roughly 1 of every 4 dollars spent on wartime contracting was wasted or misspent.

To date, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon spending spree that accompanied it and a battery of new homeland security measures instituted after Sept. 11.

How have we paid for this? Entirely through borrowing. Spending on the wars and on added security at home has accounted for more than one-quarter of the total increase in U.S. government debt since 2001. And not only did we fail to pay as we went for the wars, the George W. Bush administration also successfully pushed to cut taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, which added further to the debt. This toxic combination of lower revenues and higher spending has brought the country to its current political stalemate.

Read full article:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe–bilmes-war-cost-20110918,0,999206.story?track=rss

US response to 9/11 contributed to causes of current debt crisis

Linda Bilmes writes in the Christian Science Monitor that the costs of military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq account for well over one-quarter of the increase in US national debt since 2001. Financing wars and defense build-ups in this way is an historical aberration. Americans have typically paid for wars through higher taxes.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0908/US-response-to-9-11-contributed-to-causes-of-current-debt-crisis

The Price of Lost Chances

David Sanger of  The New York Times puts a stark price tag on the cost of reacting — and overreacting — to the Sept. 11 attacks. The New York Times provides an interactive graphic showing war costs, based on the work of Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/cost-graphic.html

Other articles:

Posted:  Anthony Gregory writes about the cost of the wars in the Huffington Post:  9/9/11 08:29 PM ET http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-gregory/post-9-11-defense-spending_b_956346.html

August 2011 has been the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the conflict began nearly 10 years ago, with 66 US troops dead this month.  This includes the deadliest attack on US forces since the beginning of the conflict, when 30 US service members, including 17 Navy SEALS, were killed when Taliban forces shot down their helicopter.

It is worth recalling that Afghanistan has proved intractable for millennia.  Reviewing Peter Tomsen’s excellent new book, “The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers” , Jonas Blank writes in Foreign Policy Magazine:

” [Tomsen]  summarizes 3000 years of Afghan history, during which the Greeks, the Romans, the White and the Black Huns, the Mongols, the Moguls, the Persians, and the Turkmens all tried to dominate the land.  Every campaign eventually came to naught, either because the invader paid insufficient attention to local culture or because he sought to impose centralized control on ferociously independent tribes and clans.  The pattern was basically the same each time: a brutally competent conqueror sweeps through Afghanistan, wreaking enough carnage to terrify all his enemies into submission, but he soon finds himself mired in a swamp of tribal customs and feuds that he does not begin to comprehend. When he loses enough in men and gold, he retreats — not infrequently with fewer limbs than he had when he arrived”.

The escalating carnage of the past few months, which has included attacks on senior government officials, NATO troops, Afghan police and security forces, and civilians,  should raise serious questions about the US strategy in the country.   The surge in U.S. deaths comes as NATO is drawing down and handing over security control to national forces, and some 10,000 U.S. troops are scheduled to depart by year’s end.  But  U.S. military personnel are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through the end of 2014. To date, the US “surge” in Afghanistan does not appear to have reduced violence or assisted in securing the country.   If we leave 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan for the next three years, what can we hope to achieve?  Or do we risk falling into the same quagmire that has ensnared empires for the past 3000 years?

The latest reports from those studying ongoing US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are gloomy in every respect.

Stuart Bowen, Special Inspector General for Iraq,  characterizes Iraq as “less safe than one year ago”. As Mr. Bowen points out,  June was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in more than two years.  Attacks on civilians and government military and police installations have also increased, including a number of deadly suicide attacks. Read Mr. Bowen’s comments: http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/07/30/iraq.us.report/index.html#

Meanwhile, the Pentagon confirms that that much of the money from the $2 billion US contract for transportation is being diverted to the Taliban.  Afghanistan trucking contractors are paying tens of millions of dollars annually to local warlords across Afghanistan in exchange for guarding their supply convoys.  Read more:  http://newsfeedresearcher.com/data/articles_n31/military-contracts-afghanistan.html

Also this week, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, issued an audit showing that an insurance program for injured contract workers in Afghanistan potentially lost tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars due to faulty billing methods.  The audit blames the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for failing to exercise strong oversight of its Defense Base Act workers compensation insurance program in Afghanistan, which led to higher insurance costs than necessary.  See: http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/PressRelease/PressRelease_20July2011_Audit11-15.pdf

FINALLY,  A bipartisan Congressional panel is expected to report that the U.S. has wasted or misspent $34 billion contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a draft report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq, which was established in 2008 to investigate the overall cost of a decade of battlefield contracting in America’s two big wars.  The report will be issued in the next few weeks. See: http://www.wartimecontracting.gov/

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