Washington debates Afghan occupation as costs of war grow

There is a muffled debate going on in Washington’s halls of power over whether and how to pursue the U.S.-NATO war on Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the government of neighboring Pakistan is blockading a military supply route vital to U.S. troops.

Commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, told the New York Times on Dec. 20 that significant U.S. troops would remain even past the current withdrawal date of 2014. A few days later, Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced, under pressure from Washington, that he agreed with allowing the Taliban to set up an office in Qatar to negotiate. (ABC News, Dec. 30)

There is significant ruling-class support for negotiations. Both the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund helped finance a recent detailed proposal from the Century Foundation called, “Afghanistan: Negotiating Peace,” on what a peace agreement in Afghanistan would entail.

It is unclear if all Taliban factions, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are willing to negotiate.

By allowing the Taliban to set up an office, Washington is admitting that the U.S. military and its allies cannot defeat the Afghan resistance strategically. This is true despite the approximately 98,000 U.S. troops occupying Afghanistan, along with 90,400 Department of Defense contractors and 30,000 soldiers from allies, like France and Germany. (Congressional Research Service, R40764)

The CRS figures are just boots-on-the-ground — they exclude Special Forces, naval and air force personnel assigned to the war theater. The CRS may also underestimate the number of mercenaries, a more accurate name for personnel that the DoD calls “contractors.”

Costs for maintaining current troop levels past 2014 would be high. As of March 18, Congress had approved $1.28 trillion for all the mainly military operations Washington justified as a response to the Sept. 11, 2001 events. About $444 billion of that was spent in Afghanistan. Using the troop reduction forecasts in President Barack Obama’s 2014 “withdrawal plan,” the projected costs for all these operations through 2021 would total $1.8 trillion. This would still leave thousands of “advisers and trainers” on the ground. (CRS, RL33110 )

Currently, the DoD is spending about $6.7 billion a month in Afghanistan. Thus, maintaining current levels until 2021 would cost about $250 billion to $300 billion more, bringing up the total to nearly $2 trillion.

These figures are just what the DoD is willing to admit it spent. Nobel economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Barnes in their book focusing on Iraq, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” three years ago estimated the cost to the U.S. at $3 trillion to $5 trillion. Recently, Stiglitz estimated another $600 billion to $900 billion in future disability payments and health care costs.

The cost and impact of 10 years of fighting on Afghanistan itself have not been estimated, since it is impossible to safely gather statistics there. Regarding the life of the population, the U.N. Human Development Index, which broadly measures the welfare of a country’s people, ranks Afghanistan 181st out of 182 countries. Maternal deaths in childbirth — 1,600 to 2,000 per 100,000 births — are the worst in the world. It also has the highest proportion of people disabled from land mines and from polio. (Barnett Rubin, “The Fragmentation of Afghanistan,” p. xi)

Since the CSR did its estimates, a new factor will add to the future costs of the occupation of Afghanistan: Pakistan’s closure of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to U.S. supply convoys, which began Nov. 27. Pakistan imposed this blockade after U.S. air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers a few days earlier. Washington refused to apologize, and the Pakistani people started blocking deliveries.

After earlier temporary closures, the Pentagon reported that 30 percent of its supplies were coming through Pakistan. Another 30 percent of these supplies are flown in, the rest come by truck and train from Russia’s ports through much of the Eurasian land mass, and arrive in Afghanistan through Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. On an NPR broadcast on Dec. 25, one U.S. troop said that a gallon of fuel delivered that way to an isolated post cost $100 or more. Following this route will escalate costs.

A continued blockade will escalate the costs of war even as the U.S. Congress tries to impose “austerity” on all social programs at home and the economy stagnates.