And let’s face it, it’s a war worth ending fast. Almost a decade after the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. military is still fruitlessly engaged in possibly the stupidest frontier war in our history. It’s just the sort of conflict that has historically tended to drive declining imperial powers around the bend.
There’s genuine money to be slashed simply by bringing the troops home, but okay, I hear you. You live in Washington and you can’t bear to give up that war, lock, stock, and barrel. I understand. Really, I do. So let’s just pretend that we’re part of that “moderate” and beleaguered House leadership and really only want to go after $40 billion in the federal budget.
In that case, here’s an idea, We’ve been training the Afghan military and police forces for almost a decade now, dumping an estimated $29 billion plus into the endeavor, only to find that, unlike the Taliban, our Afghans generally prefer not to fight and love to desert. What if the Obama administration were simply to stop the training program? What if we weren’t to spend the $11.6 billion slated for 2011, or the up to $12.8 billion being discussed for next year, or the $6 billion or more annually thereafter to create a security force of nearly four hundred thousand Afghans that we’ll have to pay for into eternity, since the Afghan government is essentially broke?
What if, instead, we went cold turkey on our obsession with training Afghans? For one thing, you’d promptly wipe out more than a quarter of that $40 billion the House leadership wants cut and many more billions for years to come. (And that doesn’t even take into account all the savable American dollars going down the tubes in Afghanistan—a recent report from the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction suggested it adds up to $12 billion for the Afghan army alone—in graft, corruption, and pure incompetence.)
Are we actually safer if we get rid of police, firefighters, and teachers here in the United States, while essentially hiring hordes of police and military personnel to secure Afghanistan? I suspect you know how most Americans would answer that question.
Dumb Intelligence Runs Rampant
Here’s another way to approach both those $40 billion and $100 billion targets. Start with the budget for the labyrinthine U.S. Intelligence Community, which is officially $80.1 billion. That, of course, is sure to prove an undercount. So, just for the heck of it, let’s take a wild guess and assume that the real figure probably edges closer to $100 billion. I know, the Republican House majority will never agree to get rid of all seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies, and neither will the Democrats. They’ll claim that Washington would be blinded by such an act—although it’s no less reasonable to argue that, without the blinders of what we call “intelligence,” which is largely a morass of dead thinking about our world, our leaders might finally be able to see again.
Nonetheless, in the spirit of compromise with a crew that hates the “federal bureaucracy” (until the words “national security” come up), how about cutting back from seventeen intelligence outfits to maybe three? Let’s say, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. I’ll bet you’re talking an easy $40 to $50 billion dollars in savings right there, and the cost of the job-retraining programs for the out-of-work intelligence analysts and operatives would be minimal by comparison.
According to a Washington Post series, “Top Secret America,” here are just a few of the things that taxpayers have helped our intelligence bureaucracy do: Produce fifty thousand intelligence reports annually, create the redundancy of “51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, [to] track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks,” and, in the category of the monumental (as well as monumentally useless), construct “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work… since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.”
Take just one example: the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which has sixteen thousand employees and a “black budget thought to be at least $5 billion per year.” Until now, you may not have known that such an outfit was protecting your security, but you’re paying through the nose for its construction spree anyway. Believe it or not, as Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out, it now has a gleaming new, nearly Pentagon-sized headquarters complex rising in Virginia at the cost of $1.8 billion—almost as expensive, that is, as the Freedom Tower now going up at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
Or let’s check out some smaller, distinctly chopable potatoes. Officially, America’s Iraq War is ending (even if in a Shiite-dominated state allied with Iran). All American military personnel are, at least theoretically, to leave the country by year’s end. Whether that happens or not, the Obama administration evidently remains convinced that it’s in our interest to prolong our effort to control that country. As a result, the planned “civilian” presence left behind to staff the three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar citadel of an “embassy” the United States built in downtown Baghdad as well as various consular outposts will look uncomfortably like a mini-army.
As Wired’s Danger Room blog put it, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq “will become a de facto general of a huge, for-hire army.” We’re talking about 5,100 mercenaries paid to guard the 12,000 “civilians,” representing various U.S. government agencies and the State Department there. To guard the Baghdad embassy alone—really a regional command headquarters—there will be 3,650 hired guns under contract for almost $1 billion. The full complement of heavily armed mercenaries will operate out of “15 different sites… including 3 air hubs, 3 police training centers… and 5 Office of Security Cooperation sites.”
In 2010, USA Today estimated that the cost of operating just the monstrous Baghdad embassy was more than $1.5 billion a year. God knows what it is now.
What if the cost-cutters in Washington were to conclude that it was a fruitless task to try to manage the unmanageable (i.e., Iraq) and that, instead of militarizing the State Department, the United States should return to the business of diplomacy with a modest embassy and a consulate or two to negotiate deals, discuss matters of common interest, and hand out the odd visa. That would represent a cost-cutting extravaganza on a small scale. The same could be said for the near billion-dollar “embassy” being built in Islamabad, Pakistan, and the $790 million going into another such embassy and consulates in Afghanistan.
Deep in the Big Muddy
It’s important to note that none of the potential cost-cutting measures I’ve mentioned touch the big palooka. I’m talking about the Pentagon budget, a very distinctive “entitlement” program on the American landscape. Given the news reports on “Pentagon cuts” lately, you might think that the Obama administration is taking a hatchet to the Defense Department’s funds, but no such luck. Defense analyst Miriam Pemberton has written, “The Pentagon is following the familiar tradition of planning ambitious increases, paring them back, and calling this a cut.” In fact, the proposed Pentagon budget for 2012 actually represents an increase over the already stunningly bloated 2011 version of the same.
Keep in mind that U.S. military spending equals that of the next fifteen countries combined (most of them allies) and represents 47 percent of total global military spending. If Washington’s mindset were different, it wouldn’t be hard to find that $100 billion the Republican House freshmen are looking for in the Pentagon budget alone—quite aside from cuts in supplemental war-fighting funds—and still be the most heavily armed nation on the planet.