Who Stole the American Dream? (49 page)

The Eisenhower Study Group called the $3.5 trillion figure a conservative estimate.
A more realistic “moderate” estimate, they said, would be $4.4 trillion.

All those costs represent deficit spending, added to the national debt and far, far above the forecasts of the Bush administration, which suggested the two wars would be short and cheap. Bush’s budget director, Mitch Daniels, estimated the Iraqi war costs at $50–$60 billion. Bush
fired his top economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, for telling a reporter that the Iraq war might cost from $100 billion to $200 billion. The
Pentagon estimated the Afghan war would cost $1 billion a month, or $120 billion over ten years.

The costs skyrocketed because both wars lasted much longer than the Bush administration expected—and as policy experts remind us, they lasted longer for two reasons.

One was Bush’s decision not to raise taxes to finance the wars—a decision attacked by conservatives as well as liberals. Wars that are unpaid for last longer, according to Bruce Bartlett, a former high Republican official in the Reagan and first Bush presidencies. “
History shows that wars financed heavily by higher taxes, such as the Korean War and the first Gulf War [1991], end quickly, while those financed largely by deficits, such as the Vietnam War and current Middle East conflicts [Iraq and Afghanistan], tend to drag on indefinitely,” Bartlett wrote. Cato Institute researchers William Niskanen and Benjamin Friedman said
unfunded wars drag on because “deficit financing sends war bills to future taxpayers…. The effect is to make war feel cheaper….”

The other main reason that wars drag on is what generals call “mission creep”—U.S. forces are sent in with a narrow mission and that evolves over time into a much more ambitious and costly mission. In Iraq, the mission was to overthrow Saddam Hussein and to find and destroy his weapons of mass destruction. When
there were no such weapons, the mission shifted to building Iraqi democracy.

In Afghanistan, America’s initial goal was to avenge the terrorist attack of 9/11 and to disrupt, dismantle, and decapitate al-Qaeda by destroying its Afghan bases and killing Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. “
The mission is to bring al-Qaeda to justice and to make sure Afghanistan no longer serves as a haven for terrorists,” President Bush asserted on November 26, 2001.

Bush emphasized that he did not want to get drawn into a protracted guerrilla war. Soon after the first U.S. attacks against al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, a reporter asked him how the United States was going to avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like quagmire.

“We learned
some very important lessons in Vietnam,” Bush replied. “Perhaps the most important lesson that I learned is that you cannot fight a guerrilla war with conventional forces.” In his 2000 campaign, Bush declared his aversion to nation building and chided President Clinton for peacekeeping and democracy-building missions abroad. As president, in July 2001, Bush underscored the point that he “thought that
our military should be used to fight and win wars…. And that I was concerned … about how we use our troops for nation-building exercises, which I have rebuffed as a, basically rebuffed as a kind of a strategy for the military.”

But once al-Qaeda had been routed, the Taliban regime in Kabul had been overthrown, and bin Laden had fled into Pakistan, Bush widened his objectives. In April 2002, the president proclaimed a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan. “
We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations,” Bush declared. He ticked off an ambitious agenda for nation building. “Peace will be achieved,” he said, “by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government … train and develop its own national army … [build] an education system for boys and girls which works. We’re working hard in Afghanistan. We’re clearing minefields. We’re rebuilding roads. We’re improving medical care. And we will work to help Afghanistan to develop an economy that can feed its people without feeding the world’s demand for drugs.”

Then in 2003, as Bush plunged America into war in Iraq, he shifted resources away from Afghanistan, but he still spoke glowingly about “Afghanistan’s journey to democracy and peace.” At a White House meeting with Afghan president Hamid Karzai in June 2004, Bush emphasized America’s “ironclad commitment to help Afghanistan succeed and prosper.”

The mission creep was not merely rhetorical. As the president changed his stance, America’s military objectives morphed into new ones. Al-Qaeda, once in the Pentagon’s bull’s-eye in Afghanistan, faded. By 2006 if not earlier,
al-Qaeda and its Arab recruits had for all practical purposes disappeared from Afghanistan, according to General David McKiernan, the U.S. commander there. Al-Qaeda had found better, safer havens in Pakistan and was able to mount attacks against the West from other bases around the world. So the original rationale for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, which had made sense and had strong popular support, had become defunct.

The Pentagon simply shifted gears. Following the president’s lead, the nation’s military leaders took on the immense mission of nation building in Afghanistan. To Robert Blackwill, Bush’s deputy national security adviser during 2003–2004, that shift was a strategic blunder. “
The mistaken mission creep in Afghanistan during the Bush years was moving from counterterrorism after 9/11—to destroy al-Qaeda—to nation building …,” said Blackwill. “Given the history and culture of Afghanistan, that was always many bridges too far.”

In the lexicon of national security, as Blackwill observed, the White House and the generals slipped from a “counterterrorism strategy” to a “counterinsurgency strategy.” They are very different. Counterterrorism targets the terrorist network, using small operations by highly trained forces such as the Navy SEAL team that
killed Osama bin Laden. In the past five years, its main field of operations has been outside of Afghanistan. Its primary weapons have been drones operating over the tribal areas of Pakistan or Yemen.

Counterinsurgency is far broader and much more expensive. It involves taking on the full range of tribal forces allied with the Taliban. It means pacifying an entire vast mountainous country and simultaneously trying to create an effective national army and police and to establish a stable Afghan government. It takes much longer than counterterrorism and requires much larger forces and much more foreign development aid.

Counterinsurgency is precisely the kind of complicated, long-term nation building that Bush had once so staunchly opposed. But by the end of his term, President Bush had switched. He enshrined an open-ended U.S. commitment to Afghanistan. “We have a strategic interest and I believe a moral interest in a prosperous and peaceful democratic Afghanistan. And
no matter how long it takes,” Bush vowed, “we will help the people of Afghanistan succeed.”

The Pentagon’s push to keep expanding the U.S. mission in Afghanistan found new momentum under President Obama. True to his campaign promises in 2008, Obama moved to reduce and withdraw all U.S. combat forces from Iraq. But denying Afghanistan as a potential future base for terrorists had long been his priority, and two months into his term,
Obama committed twenty-one thousand more troops to Afghanistan. Even before they arrived, Obama was under intense pressure from General Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and the top Pentagon brass to send yet another forty thousand troops.
Failure to send in more troops and stop a “deteriorating” war situation, McChrystal warned Obama in August 2009, “risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

McChrystal had put the squeeze on the new president by framing
a dilemma: Go in deeper or risk losing. His stated goal of
defeating
the Taliban represented mission leap—not creep, but leap. Until then, the more modest U.S. goal had been to “disrupt and dismantle” the Taliban.
Defeat
was setting the bar higher, sharpening the imperative for more troops and more years in Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff
wanted
defeat
written into Obama’s official orders to McChrystal.

That quickly became
a bone of contention in heated internal policy debates. In the end, Obama and his national security advisers rejected the “defeat” language. Obama’s final orders were for the military to “degrade” the Taliban insurgency and to “deny [the Taliban] the ability to overthrow the Afghan government.” In short, block the enemy, but you don’t have to crush them. Nonetheless,
Obama did agree to send thirty thousand more troops, meaning that in his first year he had more than doubled the U.S. fighting force in Afghanistan.

Just over a year later, in January 2011, General David Petraeus, the new U.S. Afghan commander, reported that the American troop surge had given U.S. and NATO forces the military initiative and had thrown the Taliban on the defensive. NATO coalition and Afghan forces had “
inflicted enormous losses” on the Taliban in the past year, Petraeus said, and “took away some of their most important safe havens.” In mid-2011, Petraeus reported a modest decline in Taliban attacks from the peak levels of 2010. The ultimate goal of leaving the Afghans able to provide for their own security, Petraeus said optimistically, was “
very hard, but it is doable.”

As the Afghan war dragged on, longtime counterinsurgency experts saw
pregnant parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the fateful U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Rufus Phillips, who had headed the U.S. civilian counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam in the early 1960s, went to Afghanistan on an official mission in mid-2009
and came home to write an essay titled “Déjà Vu All Over Again.” The war estimates of Generals Petraeus and McChrystal bore echoes of the rosy military assessments in Vietnam. U.S. commanders seemed in both wars to focus more on enemy casualties and body counts, on territory won or lost, than on the political dimensions of the conflict, which in Vietnam ultimately undid the American cause.

Of course, history does not literally repeat itself, but as Mark Twain reportedly quipped, “
It rhymes.” As Rufus Phillips saw it, the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, might appear to be going well,
but the Afghan government, like the Vietnamese, was weak, corrupt, and disliked; its national police force was inept and unreliable; and out in the rural homeland of the insurgency, Afghans, like the Vietnamese, felt little connection with the government in Kabul.
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, whom I had met in Vietnam in 1963 and who was running the U.S. civilian counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan for the Obama administration, told me in late 2010 that he, too, saw worrisome parallels between the two wars.

There is good reason to look at the Vietnam and Afghan wars in tandem because of their economic impact on America at home. Over the past seven decades, the United States has girded for security threats in Europe and now in the Pacific, but it is actually in the Arc of Danger, stretching from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Somalia to Indochina, that the United States has spent heavily in blood and treasure. This volatile region, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates would warn as he ended his tour, is where the projection of our military power has mired us in long, expensive wars whose economic and political costs have outweighed whatever they might have added to our long-term national security.

In each war, American leaders cast the struggle in grand terms, as a critical battle in a global Armageddon. The White House and Congress in the 1960s insisted that Vietnam was the linchpin of security in Asia. If Vietnam fell, policy makers insisted, other dominoes would fall—Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Southeast Asia. America itself would be threatened. Eventually Vietnam fell, but the disaster
never happened. More recently, Saddam Hussein in Iraq was portrayed as a mortal nuclear threat, but that turned out to be false. Now, in Afghanistan, we are said to be fighting the decisive battle against Islamic terrorism, but in fact, al-Qaeda was largely routed six years ago and Islamic jihadists have shifted their operating bases to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or the Internet.

In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, as former U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry repeatedly warned the White House and State Department,
the war is more political than military, more about winning “the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people than about military firepower and kill ratios. Both were guerrilla wars in which the awesome technology of the U.S. military has provided only modest advantages. In Vietnam, and now again in Afghanistan, most American policy makers have focused on the enemy’s ideology, but as Matthew Hoh observed, they have underestimated nationalism as the unifying motivator for the other side—the simple but unquenchable drive for national independence and for expelling the outsiders.

In both wars, the American cause has been crippled by corrupt governments that failed to rally the loyalty of their people. In each case, the United States has invested heavily to build an effective indigenous army and police, but the local forces have been riddled with defections and often unwilling to fight. Their weakness has forced the American military to take the lead, but that has only deepened the gulf between the local government and its people, by making it look like a puppet. Moreover, the high U.S. military profile has left a burning popular resentment when America’s high-tech weaponry has caused civilian casualties, as President Hamid Karzai has often complained.

To a majority of Americans, including those such as President Obama who disagreed with the war in Iraq, the military campaign to dislodge
al-Qaeda from Afghanistan was justified. But as mission creep moved American forces into nation building, the downside emerged: Afghanistan’s weak and mercurial leadership; rising tensions and violence between Afghan and American forces; and President Karzai’s frequent and often blistering denunciations of the American war effort.