In Afghanistan, Congress Proves the Unsustainable Will Not Be Sustained

  T he economist Herbert Stein once famously quipped that, “The unsustainable will not be sustained.” 

I’ve always thought that Stein’s Law, as economists refer to it, applied just as well to unsustainable economic policies as it did the foreign policy arena. Specifically, I think it is an apt description for what is happening to America’s more than decade-long war in Afghanistan that has cost the nation a considerable expenditure of blood and treasure.

The size and scope of the U.S. military, political and economic commitments to Afghanistan have always unsustainable, but not in terms of material power as it is often suggested. The United States, of course, is a superpower and if determined could dispatch troops and bags of money to Afghanistan probably indefinitely. 

Hell, a ten cent war tax on café lattes might just defray the costs.

Rather, I mean the Afghan War is unsustainable in terms of the political will at home to continue the war among political leaders (notice how I did not say the American public, who long ago soured on the venture.)  It has always been a matter of time before war fatigue set in and the political and electoral headwinds on U.S. policy towards Afghanistan turned against the hawks and towards the doves.

As it turns out, Congress is beginning to seriously tighten the purse strings over U.S. aid to Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reports: “With no perceptible opposition from the Obama administration, Congress has quietly downscaled Washington’s ambitions for the final year of the Afghan war, substantially curtailing development aid and military assistance plans ahead of the U.S. troop pullout.”

Apart from the budget trimming by Congress, the Obama administration is now seriously considering the zero option—which would leave no American troops in Afghanistan after this year—an idea dismissed by analysts as a diplomatic bluff rather than a genuine policy option as recently as this past summer. (See my previous post on this)

These developments should come as a surprise to officials in the Pentagon, the State Department, the Intelligence Community, and outside analysts and experts. Most folks have long operated on the expectation that a large residual force of American troops would need to remain in Afghanistan far beyond 2014 in order to continue training the Afghan military and support counterterrorism operations. Furthermore, the expectations of a residual force were coupled with projections that the United States would continue funding the Afghan government and the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) to the tune of several billion dollars a year indefinitely.

Such reasonable expectations of a strategically sound approach to U.S. foreign policy was, quite predictably, far removed from the political realities of policymaking in the United States.

Officials in the Pentagon, the State Department, and elsewhere in the government can plan and project different troop and aid levels for Afghanistan all they want. Senior officials can pledge to continue support to Kabul forever. Ultimately, however, it is Congress that controls the purse strings and the constant rhythms of the election cycle makes legislators fickle creatures.

The political will in Congress to sustain the U.S. mission in Afghanistan has waned over the last year as the rhetorical momentum has steadily turned against the hawks. Besides the continued stalemate on the battlefield, the actions of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in particular have made U.S. involvement beyond 2014 far more difficult for Congressional hawks to justify.

Karzai’s intransigence at signing the recently negotiated security agreement between Kabul and Washington, his repeated public insults aimed at the United States, and his sympathetic nods to the Taliban have made it politically toxic for hawks to drape him in the flag and demand that Washington to support his government.

Karzai’s actions have likewise given credence to the doves’ arguments that it is time for the United States to disengage from the conflict and lessen its commitment to support such a corrupt and ineffective government in Kabul. (To be fair, I have no doubt that Karzai’s moves are largely motivated by Afghan domestic politics as distancing himself from the United States only helps his handpicked successor in the presidential election scheduled for April.) 

I believe that Obama, electorally secure in his second term and fed up with a war he never wanted to fight in the first place, will probably allow the zero option to come to pass in Afghanistan as he did in Iraq. Meanwhile, doves in Congress will continue to hack away at funding levels for Afghanistan in midst of budget battles at home ahead of the midterms in November and the political jockeying ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

What does this mean for Afghanistan’s fate?

It appears there will be a very painful course correction in the works. For the past decade, the United States has built up the ANSF to an enormous size to fight the Taliban in place of U.S. combat forces which are scheduled to withdrawal this year. Yet the enormous size of the ANSF has also made it enormously expensive.

The annual cost of the ANSF is roughly $10-13 billion dollars. By comparison, the core budget of the Afghan government in 2011 (the most recent year I can find figures for) was a paltry $4.78 billion. Even more worrying is that grants from international donors, largely the United States and its allies, accounted for roughly two-thirds of the Afghan government’s core budget.

See the problem?

The sheer cost of the ANSF far outstrips the Afghan government’s ability to pay for it without significant assistance from the United States. As a striking GAO report concluded:

“Even if the Afghan government committed 100 percent of its projected domestic revenues to funding ANSF, this amount would cover only about 75 percent of the cost of supporting security forces in fiscal year 2015 and would leave the Afghan government no revenues to cover any non-security-related programs, such as public health.”

The United States essentially pays the wages of Afghan soldiers and policemen and even keeps the lights on in Kabul. As Congress tightens the purse strings, the complete collapse of the ANSF and along with it the Afghan government in the coming years are very realistic prospects.

I sincerely hope that all the sacrifices the United States has made in Afghanistan since 2001 does not unravel because of Congressional penny-pinching.

Yet as elections and troop withdrawal deadlines approaches on the political calendar, Washington seems more and more determined to head for the exits this time. Once again, political expediency trumps sound policy.