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.

The Mormon Roundup

The Book of Mormon raked in nine Tony Awards yesterday. I haven’t seen the play, but anything that puts “Joseph Smith” and “South Park” in the same sentence is OK by me. To, uh, commemorate — “celebrate” is perhaps too strong a word, considering I find divine revelation via golden plates no more convincing than a God who speaks through a burning bush — the occasion, a roundup of recent Mormon-themed news coverage:

At Newsweek, Tina Brown attempts to establish some sort of cultural meme with an issue dedicated to “The Mormon Moment.” The feature article, “Mormons Rock!” claims to reveal “why Mitt Romney and 6 million Mormons have the secret to success.” The key to LDS world dominance remains as much a secret as the oft-maligned special underwear, however. Beyond name-checking Stephanie Meyers (of unreadable Twilight fame) and Glenn Beck (late of Fox News, currently accepting gold bullion and most major credit cards for content on his own website), the article doesn’t offer much new information. However, the observation that Mormons believe in ““eternal progression,’ which means both that God himself was once a human being and that we can follow his example to evolve into gods ourselves,” does bring to mind the thetan creepiness of Scientology. Overall, the article is little more than a textbook retread of Mormon history, with references to Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman thrown in to freshen the whole thing up.

For a less obvious take on the Mormon “secret to success,” one must turn to Businessweek, which ran “God’s MBAs: Why Mormon Missions Produce Leaders” in its June 9 issue. Caroline Winter’s article offers valuable insight, though most of her conclusions — a second language gives former missionaries an edge in business and politics; 10-hour days of proselytizing teach perseverance, salesmanship and people skills — are pretty common-sense. Winter’s inside look at the life of a missionary is, if not revelatory, at least informative. The rigors of the experience are startling: “Missionaries aren’t allowed access to news and are only permitted two phone calls home each year, on Mother’s Day and Christmas.” I came away from the article convinced that the success of many Mormons depends less on the “industrious beehive” stereotype and more on the skills inculcated in Mormon youth from an early age. Winter points out that Mormons make good managers: “Kids age 12 through 18 progress through hierarchical rings of youth groups, each of which has two or three appointed leaders who learn to hold meetings, take responsibility for their groups, and check on members who aren’t attending church regularly.” As distasteful as I find the Christian drive to spread the Word of God to all us poor, benighted sinners, I can also see how maturity is prized pretty quickly out of any twenty-something dropped into a foreign city and expected not only to be self-sufficient but to produce a steady stream of converts.

Over at the New York Times, Timothy Egan writes about Jon Huntsman, whom he calls “The Reluctant Mormon.” The real message here is that Huntsman is sane (or at least was sane, considering his about-face on issues like cap-and-trade) in spite of his religion. America may not be ready for a Mormon president, but Huntman’s religion is actually beside the point. The truth is, America may not be ready for a rational Republican president. Egan praises his pragmatism:

“All I know is that 90 percent of scientists say climate change is occurring,” he told Time magazine. “If 90 percent of the oncological community said something was causing cancer, we’d listen to them.”

The benefit of Huntsman’s religion, Egan suggests, is that “he’s already a renegade. Why not take the next step?” Why not, indeed. The GOP could certainly use someone dutiful and respectful enough to serve a Democratic president, someone who isn’t looking for the next social-conservative bombshell to drop at CPAC. Someone, in short, to bring the party back — or, really, since it never had much of a claim on reality in the first place, to introduce it — to Planet Earth.