I have been asked to join my fellow panelists in speaking about U.S. interests in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. For some reason, our government has never been able to articulate these interests, but, judging by the fiscal priority Americans have assigned to these three countries in this century, they must be immense – almost transcendent. Since we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, we have spent more than $5 trillion and incurred liabilities for veterans’ disabilities and medical expenses of at least another trillion dollars, for a total of something over $6 trillion for military efforts alone.
This is money we didn’t spend on sustaining, still less improving, our own human and physical infrastructure or current and future well-being. We borrowed almost all of it. Estimates of the costs of servicing the resulting debt run to an additional $8 trillion over the next few decades. Future generations of Americans will suffer from our failure to invest in education, scientific research, and transportation. On top of that, we have put them in hock for at least $14 trillion in war debt. Who says foreign policy is irrelevant to ordinary Americans?
At the moment, it seems unlikely our descendants will feel they got their money’s worth. We have lost or are losing all our so-called “forever wars.” Nor are the people of West Asia and North Africa likely to remember our interventions favorably. Since we began them in 2001, well over one million individuals in West Asia have died violent deaths. Many times more than that have died as a result of sanctions, lost access to medical care, starvation, and other indirect effects of the battering of infrastructure, civil wars, and societal collapse our invasions have inflicted on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria and their neighbors.
The so-called “Global War on Terrorism” launched in Afghanistan in 2001 has metastasized. The US. Armed forces are now combating “terrorism” (and making new enemies) in eighty countries. In Syria alone, where since 2011 we have bombed and fueled proxy wars against both the Syrian government and its extremist foes, nearly 600,000 have died. 11 million have been driven from their homes, five million of them into refuge in other countries.
Future historians will struggle to explain how an originally limited post-9/11 punitive raid into Afghanistan morphed without debate into a failed effort to pacify and transform the country. Our intervention began on October 7, 2001. By December 17, when the battle of Tora Bora ended, we had accomplished our dual objectives of killing, capturing, or dispersing the al Qaeda architects of “9/11” and thrashing the Taliban to teach them that they could not afford to give safe haven to the enemies of the United States. We were well placed then to cut the deal we now belatedly seek to make, demanding that the governing authorities in Afghanistan deny their territory to terrorists with global reach as the price of our departure, and promising to return if they don’t.
Instead, carried away with our own brilliance in dislodging the Islamic Emirate from Kabul and the ninety percent of the rest of the country it then controlled, we nonchalantly moved the goal posts and committed ourselves to bringing Afghans the blessings of E PLURIBUS UNUM, liberty, and gender equality, whether they wanted these sacraments or not. Why? What interests of the United States – as opposed to ideological ambitions – justified this experiment in armed evangelism?
The success of policies is measurable only by the extent to which they achieve their objectives and serve a hierarchy of national interests. When, as in the case of the effort to pacify Afghanistan and reengineer Iraq, there is no coherent statement of war aims, one is left to evaluate policies in terms of their results. And one is also left to wonder what interests those policies were initially meant to support or advance.
In the end, our interests in Afghanistan seem to have come down to avoiding having to admit defeat, keeping faith with Afghans whose hopes we raised to unrealistic levels, and protecting those who have collaborated with us. In other words, we have acted in accordance with what behavioral economists call “the fallacy of sunk costs.” We have thrown good money after bad. We have doubled down on a losing game. We have reinforced failure.
To justify the continuation of costly but unsuccessful policies, our leaders have cited the definitive argument of all losers, the need to preserve “credibility.” This is the theory that steadfastness in counterproductive behavior is better for one’s reputation than acknowledging impasse and changing course. By hanging around in Afghanistan, we have indeed demonstrated that we value obduracy above strategy, wisdom, and tactical flexibility. It is hard to argue this this has enhanced our reputation internationally. (...)
By taking over Iraq, we successfully prevented Baghdad from transferring nonexistent weapons to terrorist groups that did not exist until our thoughtless vivisection of Iraqi society created them. We also destroyed Iraq as the balancer and check on Iran’s regional ambitions, an interest that had previously been a pillar of our policies in the Persian Gulf. This made continued offshore balancing impossible and compelled us for the first time to station U.S. forces in the region permanently. This, in turn, transformed the security relationship between the Gulf Arabs and Iran from regional rivalry into military confrontation, producing a series of proxy wars in which our Arab protégés have demanded and obtained our support.
Our intervention in Iraq ignited long-smoldering divisions between Shiite and Sunni Islam, fueling passions that have undermined religious tolerance and fostered terrorism both regionally and worldwide. The only gainers from our misadventures in Iraq were Iran and Israel, which saw their most formidable Arab rival flattened, and, of course, the U.S. defense and homeland security budgets, which fattened on the resulting threat of terrorist blowback. Ironically, the demise of Iraq as an effective adversary thrust Israel into enemy deprivation syndrome, leading to its (and later our) designation of Iran as the devil incarnate. Israel, joined by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, believes that the cure for its apprehensions about Iran is for the U.S. military to crush it on their behalf.
The other principal legacies of our lurch into strategy-free militarism, aside from debt and a bloated defense budget, are our now habitual pursuit of military solutions to non-military problems, our greatly diminished deference to foreign sovereignty and international law, domestic populism born of war weariness and disillusionment with Washington, declining willingness of allies to follow us, the incitement of violent anti-Americanism among the Muslim fourth of humanity, the entrenchment of Islamophobia in U.S. politics, and the paranoia and xenophobia these developments have catalyzed among Americans. (...)
To say, “we meant well” is true – as true of the members of our armed forces as it is of our diplomats and development specialists. But good intentions are not a persuasive excuse for the outcomes wars contrive. We have hoped that the many good things we have done to advance human and civil rights in Afghanistan and Iraq might survive our inevitable disengagement from both. They won’t. The years to come are less likely to gratify us than to force us to acknowledge that the harm we have done to our own country in this century vastly exceeds the good we have done abroad.
This is money we didn’t spend on sustaining, still less improving, our own human and physical infrastructure or current and future well-being. We borrowed almost all of it. Estimates of the costs of servicing the resulting debt run to an additional $8 trillion over the next few decades. Future generations of Americans will suffer from our failure to invest in education, scientific research, and transportation. On top of that, we have put them in hock for at least $14 trillion in war debt. Who says foreign policy is irrelevant to ordinary Americans?
At the moment, it seems unlikely our descendants will feel they got their money’s worth. We have lost or are losing all our so-called “forever wars.” Nor are the people of West Asia and North Africa likely to remember our interventions favorably. Since we began them in 2001, well over one million individuals in West Asia have died violent deaths. Many times more than that have died as a result of sanctions, lost access to medical care, starvation, and other indirect effects of the battering of infrastructure, civil wars, and societal collapse our invasions have inflicted on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria and their neighbors.
The so-called “Global War on Terrorism” launched in Afghanistan in 2001 has metastasized. The US. Armed forces are now combating “terrorism” (and making new enemies) in eighty countries. In Syria alone, where since 2011 we have bombed and fueled proxy wars against both the Syrian government and its extremist foes, nearly 600,000 have died. 11 million have been driven from their homes, five million of them into refuge in other countries.
Future historians will struggle to explain how an originally limited post-9/11 punitive raid into Afghanistan morphed without debate into a failed effort to pacify and transform the country. Our intervention began on October 7, 2001. By December 17, when the battle of Tora Bora ended, we had accomplished our dual objectives of killing, capturing, or dispersing the al Qaeda architects of “9/11” and thrashing the Taliban to teach them that they could not afford to give safe haven to the enemies of the United States. We were well placed then to cut the deal we now belatedly seek to make, demanding that the governing authorities in Afghanistan deny their territory to terrorists with global reach as the price of our departure, and promising to return if they don’t.
Instead, carried away with our own brilliance in dislodging the Islamic Emirate from Kabul and the ninety percent of the rest of the country it then controlled, we nonchalantly moved the goal posts and committed ourselves to bringing Afghans the blessings of E PLURIBUS UNUM, liberty, and gender equality, whether they wanted these sacraments or not. Why? What interests of the United States – as opposed to ideological ambitions – justified this experiment in armed evangelism?
The success of policies is measurable only by the extent to which they achieve their objectives and serve a hierarchy of national interests. When, as in the case of the effort to pacify Afghanistan and reengineer Iraq, there is no coherent statement of war aims, one is left to evaluate policies in terms of their results. And one is also left to wonder what interests those policies were initially meant to support or advance.
In the end, our interests in Afghanistan seem to have come down to avoiding having to admit defeat, keeping faith with Afghans whose hopes we raised to unrealistic levels, and protecting those who have collaborated with us. In other words, we have acted in accordance with what behavioral economists call “the fallacy of sunk costs.” We have thrown good money after bad. We have doubled down on a losing game. We have reinforced failure.
To justify the continuation of costly but unsuccessful policies, our leaders have cited the definitive argument of all losers, the need to preserve “credibility.” This is the theory that steadfastness in counterproductive behavior is better for one’s reputation than acknowledging impasse and changing course. By hanging around in Afghanistan, we have indeed demonstrated that we value obduracy above strategy, wisdom, and tactical flexibility. It is hard to argue this this has enhanced our reputation internationally. (...)
Our intervention in Iraq ignited long-smoldering divisions between Shiite and Sunni Islam, fueling passions that have undermined religious tolerance and fostered terrorism both regionally and worldwide. The only gainers from our misadventures in Iraq were Iran and Israel, which saw their most formidable Arab rival flattened, and, of course, the U.S. defense and homeland security budgets, which fattened on the resulting threat of terrorist blowback. Ironically, the demise of Iraq as an effective adversary thrust Israel into enemy deprivation syndrome, leading to its (and later our) designation of Iran as the devil incarnate. Israel, joined by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, believes that the cure for its apprehensions about Iran is for the U.S. military to crush it on their behalf.
The other principal legacies of our lurch into strategy-free militarism, aside from debt and a bloated defense budget, are our now habitual pursuit of military solutions to non-military problems, our greatly diminished deference to foreign sovereignty and international law, domestic populism born of war weariness and disillusionment with Washington, declining willingness of allies to follow us, the incitement of violent anti-Americanism among the Muslim fourth of humanity, the entrenchment of Islamophobia in U.S. politics, and the paranoia and xenophobia these developments have catalyzed among Americans. (...)
To say, “we meant well” is true – as true of the members of our armed forces as it is of our diplomats and development specialists. But good intentions are not a persuasive excuse for the outcomes wars contrive. We have hoped that the many good things we have done to advance human and civil rights in Afghanistan and Iraq might survive our inevitable disengagement from both. They won’t. The years to come are less likely to gratify us than to force us to acknowledge that the harm we have done to our own country in this century vastly exceeds the good we have done abroad.
by Chas. W. Freeman | Read more:
[ed. See also: 10 Ways that the Climate Crisis and Militarism are Intertwined (Counterpunch).]
[ed. See also: 10 Ways that the Climate Crisis and Militarism are Intertwined (Counterpunch).]
