I haven't been one to be bashful about my opinions on the War in Afghanistan. Nearly two years ago, I had opined that being in Afghanistan was a bad idea, both from geopolitical and militaristic points of view. There's one point that I had not mentioned prior to today: economic.
According to Pew Center numbers, 60% of Americans believe that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have caused debt. When you spend über amounts of money that you don't even have to begin with, and have no exit strategy in terms of being able to pay the money back, that would be a textbook example of debt.
The American government spends comparably way more on defense spending than any other Western nation. I don't really want to get into how the rest of the developed world should be putting their fair share in defense spending, or how America needs to stop acting like the world's policeman, but it makes me ask: Why are we still over there in the first place? Are we trying to mollify our consciences by unwaveringly supporting a failed attempt at nation-building?
The majority of the American people, probably for the first time, want the troops to come home because they feel that the probability of a stable government being created in Afghanistan is unlikely. Even if the primary objective was to get bin Laden (why that took the greatest military in the world a decade to do, I'll never know), Al Qaeda is going to replace him with some other stooge, and they'll continue to do the same terrorist acts that they have been doing. If you want to stop Al Qaeda, stop focusing on nation-building and start looking at counter-terrorism. You can create a smaller, but more effective defense strategy that is not only more economically salient, but also minimizes the possibility of putting troops in harm's way. It sounds like a win-win, no-brainer suggestion, but for the 40% who cannot understand the overtly simple premise that wars cause debt, I guess they'll be the ones waving their flags with blind patriotism and pressuring politicians to support the war until the economic burden helps put America six feet under.
Well yeah. The US should stop acting as the World's Policeman. Have any alternate candidates in mind? Russia? China? Some one else perhaps?
ReplyDeleteYou do understand that a power vacuum led to WW2. Care to repeat the exercise? With atomics?
There is a reason we spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. We don't want the rest of the world getting ugly ideas.
Is it a perfect system? Hell no. But it has prevented a major war for 65 years. But people forget. So maybe we need another lesson. Oh. Well.
I would first like to point out that there were many proxy wars throughout the world during the Cold War, including the Greek Civil War, the Yom Kippur War, the Korean War, Vietnam War, just to name a few. These were all fought when the power vacuum was filled up by the US and the USSR.
ReplyDeleteWorld War Two was part of the pre-atomic age, which didn't have to contend with nuclear threat or the deterrent theory of Mutually Assured Destruction.
The main point I would like to bring up is that I wasn't touting an isolationist policy. The last paragraph of my blog entry specifically dealt with a smaller, more efficient military budget. When defense spending is nearly one-fifth of an already-bloated budget, it should stop and make us think about how we're spending billions of dollars on a useless endeavor such as Afghanistan. Instead of giving into the argumentum ad metum that is so prevalent in pro-war rhetoric, we should be discussing how we can achieve the goal of global stability without bankrupting the American people.