GOP Foreign Policy in One Infographic

The GOP enjoys a longstanding reputation as the party of national security. It’s a major reason that George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, just three years after 9/11 helped spike his approval ratings to record levels. Even after President Obama took out Osama bin Laden, the 2012 Republican presidential contenders painted him and his fellow Democrats as Islamist-appeasing declinists. If you see a yellow Support Our Troops ribbon on the back of a Jeep, there’s a good chance the driver voted for Mitt Romney. But while Republicans like to think they’re strong on national defense, but how much do they really care about the troops in the field? Not much, if you go by the GOP’s dismal performance at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing for potential Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, in which they were far more concerned with slamming the nominee on Israel – a tiny country in the Middle East where no US soldiers are dying – than with asking substantial questions about the truly important issues facing the Defense Department.

The hearings have received much coverage for representing a nadir of Senate comity, with Hagel’s Republican inquisitors essentially accusing him of anti-Semitism, engaging in McCarthy-style guilt-by-association, and demanding examples of the influence of the “Jewish lobby” that Hagel once claimed makes politicians do “dumb things.” (Here’s an example: Your question.)  Even worse, however, was what was not said. The obsession with Israel crowded out any inquiries about the actual difficulties that the next Secretary of Defense will face. The senators not only eschewed discussion of every serious challenge facing today’s military – enumerated by Slate’s Fred Kaplan as “the impending budget cuts, the ‘pivot’ of U.S. forces from Europe to Asia, the wisdom of drone strikes, the mission of the Army, the role of force in foreign policy” – but also almost completely punted on the issue of Afghanistan, the one country in which we are fighting a war. (Operations in Iraq are technically over, and though America’s future in that country would have also been a good topic to broach, it was mostly contained to McCain’s belligerent, cranky badgering about Hagel’s opposition to the surge . . . an operation which ended five years ago.)

“Viewers watching the Senate Armed Services confirmation hearing for former Sen. Chuck Hagel Thursday could be forgiven for forgetting that America is at war,” wrote Gayle Lemmon at Foreign Policy, describing the atmosphere as “a curious mix of apathy and amnesia concerning America’s longest-ever war” that mirrored the sentiments of the public at large, 60 percent of which no longer thinks the war was worth its cost.

What did they talk about instead? Israel, Israel and Israel, with a dash of Iran thrown in to spice things up. Here is a word cloud, posted by The Atlantic’s James Fallows, made from the hearing transcripts:

Fallows’ commentary is biting:

What do you have to peer to see? Oh, how about the place where the largest number of U.S. troops are now in combat: “Afghanistan.” Or “Iraq.” And what is not there at all? Or, if present, nearly impossible to find? How about “NATO.” Or “China,” or “Japan.” Or “Pakistan,” or “Russia.” Or “budget.” Or “veterans,” “women in combat,” etc. “Oil.”

I don’t often agree with the libertarians at Reason, but Gene Healy’s take on the disproportionate focus on Israel is worth quoting at length:

You’d think our defense posture toward China is an important issue, but I count only five references—four by Hagel himself and one by overeager freshman Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who asked whether Hagel was “part of a group that traveled to China” with a prominent critic of Israel. (Hagel says no).

The “special relationship” with Israel—embraced by everyone at the hearing including the nominee—was special enough to win Israel 166 references in the transcript, more than any other country. Is Israel really 33 times as important to the U.S. as an emerging superpower with 19 percent of the world’s population?

Afghanistan, according to a tally compiled by BuzzFeed, showed up a mere 20 times. Other sources define “references” differently, coming up with 24 mentions, but the point is the same. (For what its worth, the word “drone” — representing one of the Pentagon’s most controversial policies — came up not a single time.)

Now, Time has another graphic, one that is even more damning of the Senate’s myopic focus on Israel, and one that demonstrates how it is Republicans in particular who have been derelict in their duty to look out for actual members of the military. Brandon Friedman, a veteran himself, writes at Time’s website that “the Senate Armed Services Committee—particularly its Republican membership—is more concerned with the apparent American defense secretary’s relationship with Israel than with the future of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the fate of U.S. troops engaged in both locations.” He presents the following chart:

For the party of the armed forces, Republican senators sure weren’t throwing a bone to the troops in the field. The GOP often views veterans as captive votes, and they indeed typically break for the Republican candidate. But a glance at the senators who asked questions about the place active-duty soldiers are dying reveals that they are nearly all Democrats. Sen. Carl Levin, the chairman of the committee, accounted for most of the mentions, but fellow liberals Joe Donnelly, Claire McCaskill, and Earl Blumenthal made the list as well. John McCain also brought up Afghanistan twice, though I’m not sure that outweighs his disrespectful, hostile attitude toward Hagel on the surge. (“That’s a direct question. I expect a direct answer,” he snapped, and kept pressing: “Were you correct or incorrect, yes or no?” Not that anything Hagel said would have changed McCain’s mind: “I think history has already made a judgment about the surge and you’re on the wrong side of it.”)

Time also offers these breakdowns of the Afghanistan discussion — or lack thereof:

 

The Israel count for both parties is ridiculously high, but if you’re looking for interest in actual issues of national security, Democrats win hands down. Time’s Friedman highlights an exchange between Hagel and Sen. Mike Lee, who posed a steady stream of Israel-centric questions, from the 1967 borders to Palestinian terrorism. Friedman writes:

This went on and on. In fact, Lee—by himself—made reference to Israel and its security a total of 16 times.

Why is this important? It’s important because Lee never mentioned Afghanistan and the 66,000 U.S. troops at war there.

And Lee was not alone.

Freshman Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas also grilled Hagel about Israel. He mentioned the Jewish state 10 times—without ever once referring to Afghanistan or the U.S. troops in combat there.

Friedman’s agitation is especially poignant because he has himself served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and knows from personal experience that the focus on neoconservative hot-button topics, rather than on what truly affects the country’s armed forces, “sends a disheartening message to the American men and women serving down range, under hostile fire.” Yet the committee members seemed more concerned with pleasing the Bill Kristol wing of the GOP than expressing concern for the state of the military. Even the sequester-mandated defense cuts, which Republicans scream will create a “hollow force” that will “devastate” American supremacy, paled in comparison to a few ill-conceived remarks about the “Jewish lobby” and the suggestion that — gasp! — the “slaughter” on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is horrific. About Aghanistan, Friedman continues:

After so much blood and treasure, it shouldn’t be too much to ask that the people who sent them there, and have kept them there, pay fuller attention to our ongoing hot war—even as it enters its final stages. It’s the least they could do for the soldier taking fire today.

It may be the least they could do, but if the insults and slimy attacks — “Why do you think the Iranian foreign ministry supports your nomination as secretary of defense?” asked Sen. Jim Inohfe — that flew at the Hagel hearings proved anything, it’s that “do the right thing” is hardly a motivator for Republicans in the Senate.

Afghanistan: The Forever War

Mark Thiessen, a conservative op-ed writer for the Washington Post, warns against a stepped-up pullout of American forces from Afghanistan — but what he’s really warning against is pulling out of Afghanistan at all. Ever.

Thiessen devotes Tuesday’s column to what he calls “the top five disastrous consequences of a precipitous American withdrawal,” including an end to drone strikes in Pakistan, a higher risk of nuclear proliferation, a strengthened Iran, and a resurgent al-Qaeda “emboldened to strike the United States again.” These arguments are shaky to begin with — many would argue that it is our presence in Afghanistan, not our withdrawal, stoking al-Qaeda’s ire — but Thiessen’s logic really breaks down when he rails against the “ripple effect of a precipitous American retreat.” (Apparently “precipitous” is the only adjective in the author’s arsenal.) He never addresses how two more years in Afghanistan will produce an outcome even marginally better than the dismal one he describes. By 2014, will the drone war in Pakistan be any less necessary? Will the country’s nuclear weapons be any less vulnerable to extremists? Will Iran, after another two years of U.S. troops on its doorstep, be ruled by anyone more stable than the current ayatollah? Thiessen proclaims that leaving now would mean “Iran won’t fear us, our allies won’t trust us, and fence sitters will have no reason to stand with us.” It’s hard to believe he really thinks Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are quaking in their boots right now, or that anything short of a nuclear explosion in Beijing would compel China and Russia to get off the fence.

Thiessen is not stupid, and one must assume he deliberately neglects to address what two more years in Afghanistan can achieve. After all, to admit that remaking Afghanistan requires not two years but decades would force the admission of an even more uncomfortable (and unpopular) truth: Thiessen does not think we should get out of Afghanistan at all. He believes American blood and treasure is well spent by staying in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. Given that half the respondents to a recent USA Today/Gallup poll not only “endorsed speeding up the withdrawal plans” but also “are worried that keeping American forces there makes the United States more vulnerable to terrorist attacks,” recommitting the U.S. to a never-ending war is a bridge too far for even a neoconservative chickenhawk to cross.

It’s interesting to note that Thiessen’s own party has grown considerably more bearish on the entire Afghanistan adventure. Newt Gingrich, going further than Romney or Santorum in expressing his doubts, recently admitted that the mission “may frankly not be doable.” Gingrich is rarely the voice of reason on any topic, but the question he raises is worth asking: “Is this in fact a harder, deeper problem that is not going to be susceptible to military force — at least not military force on the scale we’re prepared to do?” Certainly his position is more reasonable than those who advocate a seemingly interminable presence in the Middle East, and far more reasonable than one would expect from a politician salivating over military action against Iran.

Gingrich is in tune with Thiessen, however, in his low regard for the Obama administration’s war effort. Thiessen, who authored a book with the dubious title “Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack” (really, the same CIA that missed 9/11?) writes in his op-ed that Obama “has almost entirely abdicated” the role of commander-in-chief. It’s a shaky conclusion, especially considering that the administration has studiously avoided the sort of “precipitous withdrawal” that Thiessen so vehemently warns against. On the same day that the Post published Thiessen’s op-ed, General John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, testified to the House Armed Services Committee that “we will still have combat forces in Afghanistan all the way to the end” in 2014. When pressed by Rep. Howard McKeon, a persistent critic of the administration, whether Obama “has always followed your best military judgment,” Allen answered in the affirmative and claimed the U.S. military was “on track” to achieving its goals. Presumably, those goals don’t include laying down a welcome mat for al-Qaeda or inviting further Iranian intransigence, as Thiessen claims Obama is doing. In fact, a news article in Thiessen’s own newspaper observed that “Allen’s comments appeared to place a military marker in the path of the rapid withdrawal advocated by some lawmakers and, according to opinion polls, by a majority of the American public.”

While I obviously don’t agree with Thiessen that Obama’s approach to Afghanistan is undermining Gen. Allen’s war effort, I also don’t agree with Allen that two more years will transform Afghanistan into a functional country. The rest of America seems to share that evaluation, as a recent Pew survey found that “57 percent of respondents want a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan, versus only 35 percent who want to keep forces there until the country is stable.” More ominously, sixty percent of respondents to a Washington Post/ABC News poll “believe the Afghan war wasn’t worth fighting.” I wouldn’t go that far; the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban was a legitimate response to 9/11, and denying Osama bin Laden a safe haven ultimately drove him to his end in Pakistan. (I assume Thiessen doesn’t include the killing of bin Laden among the ways Obama is “inviting the next attack.”) But the U.S. effort in Afghanistan is subject to the law of diminishing returns, and I doubt the situation will look much better in 2014 than it does today. Perhaps the best recommendation for the 2014 withdrawal date is also the most cynical: It’s not an election year.

Another Apology — And That’s a Good Thing

In a futile but personally revealing gesture, President Obama sent a letter of apology today to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the American military’s burning of copies of the Koran. Though the burning was not a deliberate offense — the Times reports that the NATO personnel who burned the Korans at a landfill apparently didn’t realize the significance of the act — it nevertheless stoked rioting in Afghanistan, where the Taliban encouraged the protests and urged Afghan security forces to “repent for their past sins . . . by turning their guns on the foreign infidel invaders.” Two American soldiers were shot amid the furor.

I won’t pretend to understand the thinking behind killing people over a burned book. The response is not only bizarre to Western eyes but should be seen as disproportionate by anyone, of any religion, who values human life. But the riots hardly come as a surprise, considering the similar outrage in 2005 over cartoons of Muhammad and a firestorm in the same year over reports that guards at Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down the toilet. The uselessness of apologizing is obvious; apologies have not stopped these riots in the past, and President Obama’s latest didn’t stop the violence today. Part of me certainly feels that an apology, especially one from someone as important as the president, is only legitimizing such a destructive reaction, but the practical side of me realizes that Obama did the right thing. Looking down our noses at the Afghans’ passion for the Koran will do nothing to help the American troops still attempting to put Afghanistan back together. We’re not going to change the cultural dynamics, as the struggle against the insurgency quickly proved, and so we are forced to work within them. If anything, the death of the two soldiers proved that the president cannot afford to be stingy with apologies; he must do everything in his power to end the riots. Obama must have known that an apology would mean little to the people shouting in the streets in Afghanistan, but he had to at least try to calm the violence.

That Obama apologized despite knowing that conservatives would crucify him for it speaks to his character. The entire Republican presidential field has criticized the president for his non-existent “apology tour,” and Mitt Romney has repeated “This president apologizes for America” so many times that he is blue in the face. Sure enough, Newt Gingrich wasted no time in labeling Obama’s letter “astonishing” and “an outrage.” The AP reports that, at a campaign event in Washington state, he said, “There seems to be nothing that radical Islamists can do to get Barack Obama’s attention in a negative way and he is consistently apologizing to people who do not deserve the apology of the president of the United States period.” The Wall Street Journal adds that Gingrich announced that Obama “refuses to defend the integrity and the lives of the people who serve under him and instead abjectly crawls to apologize to the country whose religious fanatics.”

Lovely. Newt Gingrich is the epitome of classless cluelessness. As president, how would he have responded? By egging the rioters on? That surely would have preserved “the lives of the people who serve under him.” Gingrich also ignores the fact that the NATO military commander in Afghanistan also apologized. Was General John Allen also refusing to defend the lives of his troops? The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, was right when he said Obama’s “primary concern as commander in chief is the safety of the American men and women in Afghanistan, of our military and civilian personnel there.” That’s the difference between being president and wanting to be president — one actually has the responsibility of being commander in chief, while the other only has the responsibility to demagogue and campaign. Gingrich’s faux-indignation was as predictable as it was distasteful, but Obama nevertheless acted like a president, not a candidate. During an election year, it’s often hard to see a separation between the two roles, as Obama conveniently chooses swing states in which to make major policy speeches. It wasn’t a coincidence that he chose to unveil his 2013 budget at a community college near Washington, D.C. — job training and support for community colleges are priorities not just for his proposed-yet-unpassable budget but for his reelection campaign. In the case of his apology to Karzai, however, Obama clearly put necessity above political expediency. The meme of Obama apologizing for America is a dangerous one, and one which Republicans are determined to keep alive until November. If they are able to convince enough Americans that the president really does, as Gingrich claims, “bow to a Saudi king,” Obama could be in trouble.

The president obviously knows this. But today he did the right thing anyway. That, as much as anything, shows why he’s worth reelecting.

An Incomplete Guide to 9/11 Coverage

It’s hard to name a media outlet that isn’t in some way commemorating the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. “Some specials are so niche-sensitive that they almost sound like humor-magazine parodies,” writes Alessandra Stanley in the Times. “CNBC, which has a series called ‘American Greed,’ came up with ‘American Greed: 9/11 Fraud,’ about the scams and profiteering that followed the disaster. Showtime offers ‘The Love We Make,’ about Paul McCartney’s journey through New York after Sept. 11.” Such a delicate topic means that “viewers become hypersensitive to the misplaced word or self-serving gesture.” Though most of the editors and writers undoubtedly mean well, good intentions do not always translate into quality journalism. Here, a roundup of some of the highs and lows of the print media’s 9/11 coverage.

image via esquire.com

Even after eight years, Tom Junod’s Esquire article about the iconic “Falling Man” photo stands head and shoulders above anything else written about the attacks. Junod recently published an update on the families he interviewed for the 2003 story, but it doesn’t add much to the outstanding original.

If you only read one newspaper’s coverage of the anniversary, make it the Times’ special “9/11: The Reckoning” section, which includes previously unreleased audio recordings of the flight controllers and FAA officials monitoring the hijacked planes on September 11. Two slideshows, one of possessions saved by New Yorkers and the other of 9/11-inspired artwork from across the world, are well worth clicking through. In the Sunday Magazine, a roundtable of former contributors epitomizes the paper’s elite liberal reputation. It’s the only conversation, for example, in which you’ll find a participant exclaiming “Good God, man!” with complete seriousness. Bill Keller, who just stepped down as the paper’s executive editor, offers a belated mea culpa for his part in giving the liberal seal of approval to the war in Iraq.

Businessweek offers its typical cynical take on the anniversary, running an article in the Sept. 2 issue about the reinsurance industry. Between terrorist acts and unprecedented flooding, the companies that foot the bill for reconstruction must attempt to balance risk and reward. A few weeks ago, the magazine devoted a feature-length story to Larry Silverstein, the developer building an office tower at 7 World Trade Center. If the apocalypse arrived tomorrow, Businessweek would undoubtedly be advising its readers on how to sell muni bonds to the anti-Christ.

image via newsweek.com

The most charitable thing one can say about Newsweek’s coverage is that Tina Brown has not Photoshopped an age-advanced Dick Cheney into the ceremonies at Ground Zero. Andrew Sullivan, who seemed like such a catch when Brown lured him away from The Atlantic earlier this year, takes a dismal look at the American response to the attacks, writing that “Bin Laden hoped to provoke a civilizational war between Islam and the West. And we took the bait.” Unfortunately, Sullivan continues to take the bait, trotting out the hoary cliche of Al Qaeda as “a few religious fanatics living in caves.” It’s an accurate description, to an extent, but it elides the seriousness of the threat posed by radical Islamists. A handful of fundamentalists can be dealt with — bombed back to the stone age, as the theory went before the war — but Bin Laden’s violent ideology and the deep-seated rage at the U.S. that permeates much of the world are less tractable issues. Sullivan also overstates the degree to which ordinary Americans have suffered over the past decade. Of the victims at the World Trade Center, he writes, “Their terror ended quickly. Ours had just begun.” Pat-downs at airports, two wars as foreign to most people as the moon — these are not comparable to having one’s life snuffed out on 9/11.

image via thenation.com

The Nation and Mother Jones both engage in standard liberal hand-wringing over America’s lost civil liberties. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but . . . how predictable can you get?) At The Nation, David K. Shipler writes that “Obama has perpetuated so many of the Bush administration’s policies that even Republicans might take heart.” That Mother Jones chooses to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11 with an issue dedicated to the FBI’s extraordinary rendition program gives even the casual reader an idea of its priorities. This is hardly the first time the tragedy has been misused — the Bush administration’s elevation of terror threat levels to correspond with election dates comes to mind — but it is particularly classless to run a scathing critique of post-9/11 intelligence without also acknowledging the victims of the attack. Adam Liptak of the Times actually offers a more nuanced — albeit less popular — interpretation of the Patriot Act, noting that “By historic standards, the domestic legal response to 9/11 gave rise to civil liberties tremors, not earthquakes.”

One of the more compelling stories is not from a national magazine or a New York publication but from the Boston Globe, which gives its coverage a parochial angle by recounting the stories of the ticket agents and security personnel at Logan Airport, where two of the hijacked flights originated. “They are the rarely noticed casualties of the terrorist attacks,” writes the Globe’s Eric Moskowitz. Ordinary details are twisted into life-changing, haunting memories: “Two men in their 20s approach, Middle Eastern, hair carefully trimmed, clothes so new they are still creased from the store.”

At The Atlantic, Andrew Cohen offers a fairly standard timeline of 9/11’s effects on the checks and balances of divided government. His argument, that the executive branch gained power at the expense of a fairly submissive Congress and judiciary, is familiar, as is his contention that such a concentration of power can only lead to abuse (see: Iraq, wiretapping, extraordinary rendition). The most interesting thing about this piece is Cohen’s recognition that the scales have not remained weighted in favor of the president. During George W. Bush’s second term, when a handful of Supreme Court decisions invalidated lower courts’ pro-administration rulings on indefinite detention and military tribunals, Congress mainly worked around the restrictions and allowed executive authority to grow unchecked. Since the election of Barack Obama, however, the legislative branch has rediscovered its voice, moving to place restrictions on an administration with which it disagrees. Cohen writes:

[L]awmakers blocked with great relish and fanfare the Obama Administration’s efforts to prosecute 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal civilian court. Such meddling in the discretion of the Justice Department’s charging decisions would have been unthinkable during the Age of Fear.

Apparently, the unitary executive theory was just fine as long as Dick Cheney was the one advocating it. Only when a Democrat moved into the White House did the war hawks in Congress begin to reevaluate their deference. A king is only popular among those who benefit from the palace’s largesse.

image via fastcompany.com

From across the pond, the Financial Times checks in with some of the families who had posted “missing” signs across New York after the towers collapsed. The stories are not all hopeful, but they are honest in revealing the different ways people deal with the death of a loved one.

Finally, if the TV networks’ incessant stream of 9/11 programming seems just a little crass, take a look at this Fast Company slideshow of taste-challenged advertisements. The worst offenders are from Europe, where the advertising industry as a whole is much more accepting of graphic, risque content.

Afghanistan: Everything Has a Price

On Wednesday, President Obama announced his plan to draw down American troops in Afghanistan. Ten thousand will leave the country by the end of this year; another 23,000 will pull out by next summer. The president cited the reduced threat from Al Qaeda and the killing of 20 out of 20 “most-wanted” militants, but the subtext to his speech was all about the economy. Republicans have done an about-face on national security, with the party’s 2012 presidential field expressing major reservations about the American military adventure. Jon Hunstman has been the most outspoken, criticizing American involvement in Libya and bluntly telling Esquire magazine that “We just can’t afford it.” The Times reported that he also asked rhetorically about Afghanistan, “Should we stay and play traffic cop? I don’t think that serves our strategic interests.”

Other Republicans are following suit, with Jeff Zeleny of the Times writing that the shift “appears to mark a separation from a post-Sept. 11 posture in which Republicans were largely united in supporting an aggressive use of American power around the world.” So what has changed? The Tea Party, for one; Michele Bachmann and company are persistently isolationist, deriding the very concept of foreign aid and tacking away from George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda.” In the eyes of Ron Paul, et. al., liberty is more endangered by the creeping “socialism” of the Obama administration than by Islamic extremists abroad.

The other elephant (in both figurative senses of the word) in the room, of course, is the national debt. The breadth of President Bush’s push for regime change in the Middle East was anathema to many conservatives, who saw the billions of dollars poured into Iraq and Afghanistan as an abandonment of fiscal conservatism and small-government policy. Now, with Republicans determined to slash and burn their way to a “balanced” budget (insofar as a plan that boots children off food stamps and replaces Medicare with vouchers can be called balanced), both parties are scrutinizing Pentagon spending for savings. The AP described some of the proposed cuts as “gimmickry”:

Under the rules followed by the Congressional Budget Office, the agency currently projects war spending to grow with inflation even as troop drawdowns are ongoing. That means House Republicans could claim more than $1 trillion in savings by cutting the budget for war costs to $65 billion for 2014 and $50 billion a year shortly thereafter.

To some extent, conservatives are coming late to the party. Liberal Democrats have been screaming for years about the diversion of national treasure to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dovish progressives stand ready with statistics about exactly how many teachers could be hired for the cost of one fighter jet, or how many Medicaid cuts could be avoided by plugging the hole with the shrink-wrapped loads of cash flown into Baghdad. On Monday, the United States Conference of Mayors passed a resolution that urged the president to end both wars and “bring these war dollars home to meet vital human needs, promote job creation, rebuild our infrastructure, aid municipal and state governments, and develop a new economy based upon renewable, sustainable energy and reduce the federal debt.” (The mention of the federal debt was a last-minute sop to Tea Party-esque conservatives.) Though it’s not as if money cut from the Pentagon’s budget would automatically be re-routed to cities (the federal budget is not exactly one big fungible pot), it’s telling that even low-level officials feel obligated to protest the expense.

Predictably, Republicans have castigated the president on both sides of the question. Mitt Romney, who has lately been just a step behind Huntsman in calling for an end to Middle Eastern entanglements, said that “this decision should not be based on politics or economics.” Tim Pawlenty, the most hawkish of the potential nominees, described the drawdown proposal as “deeply disturbing.” Obama faced an equal amount of criticism from the left. Joe Manchin III, a senator from West Virginia, railed against paying for a war when the nation is deeply in debt: “Will we choose to rebuild America or Afghanistan? In light of our nation’s fiscal peril, we cannot do both.” Manchin sets up a false dichotomy; surely America is rich enough to do both, especially if we raised the capital gains tax and allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire. Eliminating farm subsidies and tax loopholes for oil companies would also bring in a tidy sum.

It certainly seems straightforward to blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the country’s fiscal mess. In an article entitled “Cost of Wars a Rising Issue as Obama Weighs Troop Levels,” the Times’ Helene Cooper explains that “spending on the war in Afghanistan has skyrocketed since Mr. Obama took office, to $118.6 billion in 2011. It was $14.7 billion in 2003, when President George W. Bush turned his attention and American resources to the war in Iraq.” The increased costs in Afghanistan, of course, dovetail with a decrease in costs in Iraq, as Obama shifted his focus from the so-called “war of choice” to the “good war.” Cooper cites the upcoming election as a factor in what she terms “the argument over whether the United States should be building bridges in Kandahar or Cleveland.”

The either-or formulation is popular, but it is also simplistic in that it transforms a complicated question into a binary choice. Of course, the reduction of a thousand complexities into one yes-or-no decision is a familiar Republican tactic. (For example, conservatives would have us believe that freedom and a social safety net are mutually exclusive.) In this case, however, both parties use simplification to advance their priorities. In a Newsweek article, Lawrence Kaplan states his thesis in the headline: “Afghanistan Is Not Making America Bankrupt.” Kaplan argues that military strategy should be created without input from the guys in accounting. A war crucial to America’s interests is no less important simply because it carries a steep price tag. “Put another way, if the war is right and necessary, then its expense shouldn’t matter,” he writes. “Likewise, if it is wrong or unimportant, either morally or strategically, the president has no business risking a single American life in Afghanistan.” Maybe somebody should have mentioned this to George W. Bush before he invaded Iraq.

Discussions about the cost of war often throw around large numbers: Ezra Klein of the Washington Post points out that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that ending the war in Afghanistan will save $1.4 trillion. This is largely due to the fact way the budget office makes its projections:

In the case of discretionary spending — which is the pot of money that goes to the wars — they simply take current spending and assume it grows at the rate of inflation. So though it’s clear our wars are winding down, they won’t count the savings from them in their projections until there’s explicit government policy that winds them down.

Kaplan sees things in a different light. He writes, “Next year the Pentagon plans to spend $107 billion in Afghanistan—this, in comparison to the $3.7 trillion that the Obama team plans to spend overall. Put another way, Afghanistan amounts to all of 0.75 percent of the nation’s $14.1 trillion GDP.” By contrast, the amount spent on Medicare, Social Security and “other domestic spending” is around $2 trillion, or 20 times the annual cost of waging war in Afghanistan. Kaplan also points out that “one-time sunk costs like equipment and construction—the constellation of bases that loop around Afghanistan, not the troops who inhabit them—account for the war’s steepest expenditures.” In other words, we’ve already spent a boatload of money in Afghanistan; backing out now will do nothing to recover those costs. If the U.S. beats a hasty exit, it’s cutting off its nose to spite its face, since the ongoing cost of the war is minimal compared to the investment we’ve already made.

I don’t know enough about the defense budget and military costs to know if Kaplan is correct, but I am immediately suspicious of his conclusions, if only because $107 billion still sounds like a lot of money. John Boehner and friends almost shut down the government this spring over a paltry $38 billion. Over at the Times’ “Room for Debate,” Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank staffed by deficit hawks, echoes Kaplan’s analysis:

The Congressional Budget Office originally estimated that troop surge in Afghanistan would cost about $36 billion between 2010 and 2013, so reversing this expenditure should provide a peace dividend of between $10 and $15 billion per year. A conversation about a “peace dividend” must begin with the observation that this amount is absurdly small compared either with the $118 billion budgeted for Afghanistan in 2011 or with the overall deficit of about $1.5 trillion.

The $1.5 trillion Hassett cites is the amount borrowed by the government for one year; the national debt (as opposed to the budget deficit) is in the neighborhood of $14 trillion. That $1.5 trillion is strikingly close to the $1.2 trillion that economist Mark Zandi notes that we’ve spent in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. Though I don’t buy the theory, articulated by Zandi as well as several of his fellow contributors, that reduced defense spending in the 1990s was a direct cause of the economic boom and accompanying budget surplus, he does make a valid point:

For context, there is general agreement that the federal budget deficit must be reduced by some $4 trillion over 10 years to make the government’s fiscal situation sustainable. Simply cutting spending by half in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next decade would go a long way to achieving that goal.

In his speech on Wednesday, President Obama said that  “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.” I have my doubts that the money not spent in Afghanistan will go to repairing roads or creating jobs. Cindy Williams, another “debater” at the Times, shares this outlook. She opines that “if history is a guide, any peace dividend we get will be used instead to reduce federal deficits.” Military spending decreased in the 90s, but “virtually none of the defense windfall found its way into infrastructure, education or other government activities.”

Lost in all the talk about the cost of war is the significance of talking about it at all. Anti-war Democrats have been pilloried in recent years for suggesting that the U.S. withdraw “before the job is done” — the equivalent of “cutting and running.” A measure of that criticism was still evident on Wednesday evening, when prominent Republicans like John McCain lambasted the president for attaching (supposedly) artificial timetables to battlefield decisions. But that’s just the point: Battlefield decisions are not made solely by battlefield generals. There is a reason that the president, a civilian, is also the commander in chief of the military. Tactical decisions are not the only criteria by which foreign adventures are evaluated, despite any wishful thinking by Lawrence Kaplan. The war in Afghanistan does not exist in a vacuum, and by bringing cost-benefit analysis into the picture, Obama is only accepting reality. Perhaps it is distasteful to suggest that the public’s appetite for war should sway the president’s choices on national security, but elected officials are elected for a reason. If they cease to consider the public’s interest, they have ceased to do their jobs.

The Times reports that General Petraeus, at a hearing about his nomination as C.I.A. director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee, ““There are broader considerations beyond those just of a military commander.” He is correct in his deference. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine about Jon Huntsman’s call to wind down U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Douglas A. Ollivant states that the conversation about troop withdrawal “needs to happen in Washington.” He continues:

Too often we hear from politicians and pundits that we should defer to “the commander in the field.” But the commander in the field does not ask and should not be asking these questions. It is not the place of the ISAF commander Gen. David Petraeus to ask questions about our interests and do a cost-benefit analysis . . . . It is his job to do the best he can with the resources provided within the scope of clearly articulated national policy guidance that should, and must come from Washington.

This Wednesday, it did. Whatever the financial pluses and minuses of bringing home the “surge” troops, at least a decision has been made. Yet those who hope the country can finally move on from the wars of the past decade may be too hopeful. We’ve still got a pile of national debt and a Republican Party that refuses to bend to fiscal reality. If the GOP wants to cut and downsize its way back to prosperity, it should at least acknowledge that Obama is helping them out. After all, the cutting has to start somewhere.

With Friends Like These . . . .

“The Double Game” (The New Yorker)

Mostly I agree with all the pundits, analysts and “unnamed officials” who argue that the situation in Pakistan has left the U.S. between a rock and a hard spot. The cheek with which the country’s military and civilian leaders dismiss the Bin Laden raid as an illegal violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty is highly annoying. Twenty billion in aid since 9/11, and this is the thanks we get? The jingoist in me sees such temerity as an affront; does Pakistan really think it has a choice in the matter? But the fact is that it does have a choice. It can keep supporting, via the ISI, militant groups and al Qaeda fighters.

I’d like to think that the U.S. has a choice, too: the choice to cut off aid, to tell the Pakistanis exactly where they can stick their sovereignty. After all, I’m not even entirely convinced that a bunch of jihadists in Afghanistan and Pakistan really still pose a terrorist threat. If we pull out of Afghanistan, would the chance of another attack skyrocket? It’s hard to know, bellicose rhetoric aside, just how dedicated terrorist groups are to destroying America, especially considering the tides of the Arab Spring are lapping against closer shores. The chance of Pakistan dropping a nuclear bomb on India seems remote, though the other nuclear danger, the dispersal of bomb-making materials to groups of radicals, seems more plausible.

That said, I can see why the Obama administration feels damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t. We can’t very well abandon the effort in Pakistan — there are nukes, al Qaeda and its various offshoots, the influence on neighboring Afghanistan — but it’s hard to stomach continuing to allow the Pakistanis to play both sides. An article in the May 16 issue of The New Yorker, by Lawrence Wright, offered the first credible alternative I’ve seen:

Eliminating, or sharply reducing, military aid to Pakistan would have consequences, but they may not be the ones we fear. Diminishing the power of the military class would open up more room for civilian rule. Many Pakistanis are in favor of less U.S. aid; their slogan is “trade not aid.” In particular, Pakistani businessmen have long sought U.S. tax breaks for their textiles, which American manufacturers have resisted. Such a move would empower the civilian middle class. India would no doubt welcome a reduction in military aid to Pakistan, and the U.S. could use this as leverage to pressure India to allow the Kashmiris to vote on their future, which would very likely be a vote for independence. These two actions might do far more to enhance Pakistan’s stability, and to insure its friendship, than the billions of dollars that America now pays like a ransom.

The India-Pakistan rivalry has always seemed to me to be part of the problem; Wright’s genius is in making it part of the solution. While the military establishment in Pakistan is so strong and entrenched that I am not convinced reducing aid would empower the civilian government, making the president and prime minister more than mere figureheads is not an un-worthwhile mission. More may have to be done to accomplish it than simply slashing military aid, but in his consideration of the bigger picture in the Pakistan-Afghanistan-India morass, Wright is definitely on the right track.