Our Government Is Planning to Stay at War for the Next 80 Years -- Anyone Got a Problem with That?
Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an "arc of instability" caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years.
According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just "small wars in the midst of a big one."
Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared
war would entangle 20 future presidential terms stretching far into the future
of voters not yet born. The American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now
approaches 5,000, with the number of wounded a multiple many times greater.
Including the American dead from 9/11, that's 8,000 dead so far in the first
decade of the Long War. And if the American armed forces are stretched thin
today, try to conceive of seven more decades of combat.
The costs are
unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes,
Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit
spending of recent years, yield "virtually no room for new domestic initiatives
for Mr. Obama or his successors," according to a New York Times budget analysis
in February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today's
younger generation of resources for their future.
The term "Long War"
was first applied to America's post-9/11 conflicts in 2004 by Gen. John P.
Abizaid, then head of U.S. Central Command, and by the retiring chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of State, Gen. Richard B. Myers, in 2005.
According to
David Kilcullen, a top counterinsurgency advisor to Army Gen. David H. Petraeus
and a proponent of the Long War doctrine, the concept was polished in "a series
of windowless offices deep inside the Pentagon" by a small team that
successfully lobbied to incorporate the term into the 2006 Quadrennial
Defense Review, the nation's long-term military blueprint. President George
W. Bush declared in his 2006 State of the Union message that "our own generation
is in a long war against a determined enemy."
The concept has quietly
gained credence. Washington Post reporter-turned-author Thomas E. Ricks used
"The Long War" as the title for the epilogue of his 2009 book on Iraq, in which
he predicted that the U.S. was only halfway through the combat phase there.
It has crept into legal language. Federal Appeals Court Judge Janice
Rogers Brown, a darling of the American right, recently ruled
in favor of holding detainees permanently because otherwise, "each
successful campaign of a long war would trigger an obligation to release Taliban
fighters captured in earlier clashes."
Among defense analysts, Andrew J.
Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who teaches at Boston University, is the leading
critic of the Long War doctrine, criticizing its origins among a "small,
self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists" who view public opinion
"as something to manipulate" if they take it into consideration at all.
The Long War has momentum, though the term is absent from the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review unveiled by
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February. One commentator has noted the
review's apparent preference for finishing "our current wars before thinking
about the next."
Still we fight wars that bleed into each other without
clear end points. Political divisions in Iraq threaten to derail the complete
withdrawal of U.S. troops scheduled for 2012.
As troop levels decline in
Iraq, they grow to 100,000 in Afghanistan, where envoy Richard C. Holbrooke
famously says we'll know success "when we see it." The Afghan war has driven Al
Qaeda into Pakistan, where U.S. intelligence officers covertly collaborate with
the Pakastani military. Lately our special forces have stepped up covert
operations in Yemen.
It never ends. British security expert Peter
Neumann at King's College has said that Europe is a "nerve center" of global
jihad because of underground terrorists in havens protected by civil liberties
laws. Could that mean NATO will have to occupy Europe?
It's time the
Long War strategy was put under a microscope and made the focus of congressional
hearings and media scrutiny. The American people deserve a voice in the
strategizing that will affect their future and that of their grandchildren.
There are at least three important questions to address in public
forums:
* What is the role of the Long War idea in United States'
policy now? Can the Pentagon or president impose such war-making decisions
without debate and congressional ratification?
* Who exactly is
the enemy in a Long War? Is Al Qaeda (or "Islamic fundamentalism") considered to
be a unitary enemy like the "international communist conspiracy" was supposed to
be? Can a Long War be waged with only a blanket authorization against every
decentralized group lodged in countries from Europe to South Asia?
* Above all, what will a Long War cost in terms of American tax
dollars, American lives and American respect in the world? Is it sustainable? If
not, what are the alternatives?
President Obama has implied his
own disagreement with the Long War doctrine without openly repudiating the term.
He has pledged to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by 2012, differing with those
like Ricks who predict continuing combat, resulting in a Korean-style
occupation. Obama also pledges to "begin" American troop withdrawals from
Afghanistan by summer 2011, in contrast to those who demand we remain until an
undefined victory. Obama told West Point cadets that "our troop commitment in
Afghanistan cannot be open-ended, because the nation that I'm most interested in
building is our own."
Those are naive expectations to
neoconservatives and to some in the Pentagon for whom the Long War fills a
vacuum left by the end of the Cold War. They will try to trap Obama in a Long
War by demanding permanent bases in Iraq, slowing American withdrawals from
Afghanistan to a trickle and defending secret operations in Pakistan. Where
violence flares, he will be blamed for disengaging prematurely. Where situations
stabilize, he will be counseled it's because we keep boots on the ground. We
will keep spending dollars we don't have on wars without end.
The
underlying issues should be debated now, before the future itself has been
drafted for war.
