The Cost Of A COIN War In Afghanistan

By Steve Hynd

It's apparently a taboo subject - no-one wants to talk about how much a COIN war in Afghanistan will cost or even how long it will last. Conservatives simply don't want to "lose" and don't seem to care about the costs, while left-of-center advocates of such a "long war" seem all too aware of how their supporters and readers would react to the full story. However, in a recent post at the Small Wars Journal, David Kilcullen got refreshingly real about the committment the COINdinistas are asking in Afghanistan.

we need to be honest about how long it will take – ten to fifteen years, including at least two years of significant combat up front – and how much it will cost. Thirty thousand extra troops in Afghanistan will cost around 2 billion dollars per month beyond the roughly 20 billion we already spend; additional governance and development efforts will cost even more; in the current economic climate this is a big ask. The campaign will cost the lives of many American, Afghan and coalition soldiers and civilians, and injure many more.

Well, is say "gets real" but he's still not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The DoD actually spends $2.7 billion a month in Afghanistan right now, but what's a few hundred million either way, right? Over fifteen years that bill comes to $846 billion while "additional governance and development efforts will cost even more". Basing some conservative guesstimates on what the ratio of military to reconstruction and other spending has been, those efforts will cost somewhere in the region of $35 billion, with at least another $17.5 billion to pay VA benefits for the inevitable toll in blood. Add in the $173 billion already spent and the $285 billion or so in debt servicing all that deficit spending will cost and the grand total will come to a cool $1.3 trillion. That's $1,300,000,000,000 for those who like to see all the zeroes.

Being "considerably smaller in scale than its behemoth Iraqi counterpart" leaves Afghanistan plenty of room to be very expensive indeed over the entire course of a war that will go on and on even if things go well.

And how about that cost in blood? Well, so far the war in Afghanistan has cost 667 US soldiers their lives. But the pace of casualties has been accelerating. 155 of those deaths were in 2008 alone and 2009 is set to be even deadlier. Afghan civilian casualties have been accelerating too - up over 40% in the last year - and somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 have already died, along with more tens of thousands wounded or simply displaced as refugees.

Extend those casualty rates onward for another 10 to 15 years. That's the butcher's bill.

So far, despite their massively successful PR campaign, it's unclear that the COINdinistas can deliver all they promise. They know it too - the US Governments official COIN guide, written in part by Kilcullen himself,  repeatedly says that it doesn't really help too much with the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations as they weren't conceived from the first as COIN/nation-building interventions and are therefore far off the COIN rails already. It's more concerned with how wonderfully successful the next set of COIN wars will be. There's no guarantee of success from a long COIN war even if we spend all that blood and treasure.

Kilcullen, though, is disparaging of "Option B".

Some have recently argued for “Option B”, where we would focus solely on the Prevent task, putting Protect, Build and Hand-Off on hold. We would conduct counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda, while doing the minimum development and population protection needed to enable those operations, and shelving long-term nation-building aspirations. After all, we might say, we went into Afghanistan to defeat Al Qa’ida, not to build a model state in the Hindu Kush.

The problem with Option A is that we may not be able to afford it. The trouble with Option B is much simpler: it just won’t work.

Afghanistan is an independent sovereign state: why would it tolerate an approach that treated its territory as little more than a launch pad for strikes against Al Qa’ida, while doing little to alleviate poverty, institute the rule of law or improve health and education? What would be in it for Afghanistan? How would we gain the information needed for effective counterterrorism operations – much of it derived from human sources, human terrain intelligence and close-access signals intelligence – without maintaining a substantial coalition force in close contact with the local population? Why would that population cooperate with an effort which, in the absence of substantial development assistance and the creation of functioning responsive government, brought the people little but danger in return? Why would the Taliban obligingly put their insurgency on hold, if we ignored them to focus on Al Qa’ida? Wouldn’t Option B accelerate the loss of popular confidence among Afghans, and make the insurgency even more likely to overthrow the government? And how would we finesse our failure to honor the pledges we gave our allies and the Afghan people in the Bonn agreement, not to mention the campaign promises of a new and popular President?

I fail to understand how he can say that and then say, about Pakistan:

In those limited areas where Pakistan has proven unable or unwilling to establish government control (and therefore, in fact, areas that lie outside its effective sovereignty even though they may lie within its geographical boundaries) the international community would still need to reserve the right to unilaterally strike terrorist targets, but this must be a last resort, based where possible on consultation with Islamabad, applied only with the specific knowledge and approval, on a case-by-case basis, of President Obama, and only to targets that met all four of the following selection criteria:

1) The target in question poses a threat to the international community (not solely to U.S. forces or interests in Afghanistan); AND
2) It is located in an area outside of effective Pakistani sovereignty (e.g. in a non-controlled area of the FATA or in a micro-haven elsewhere) AND
3) Pakistan has tried but failed to extend its sovereignty into the area, or to deal effectively with the target on its own; AND
4) The target is positively identified and clearly distinguishable from surrounding populations, reducing the risk of collateral damage to a level acceptable to elected political leaders.

Some might argue that this sets an extremely high bar, so high that in practice such strikes would almost never be approved. I agree – that’s the whole point.

All those "limited areas" where Pakistan's central government can no longer be certain of enforcing its writ, put together, comprise almost a third of Pakistani territory. Is Afghanistan so failed already that it doesn't even compare in lawfulness to the FATA, Swat and the rest? If so, then surely the next year isn't the crunch time - last year or the year before was and it's too late for a COIN approach. If not, then why can't the same rules be applied while diplomacy and aid slowly builds Afghanistan over an even longer timeline but at vastly reduced human and monetary costs?

Kilcullen may say Option B won't work - and may be right to say so - but what's for certain is that there hasn't been even a tenth as much effort spent exploring how it could be made to work as has been expended already on making Bush's maladministration into something a new state can maybe arise from. If there had been, we'd have found a way to make containment maybe work against the odds too.

Comments

[Batocchio]

Funny how those urging for war never talk much about its costs, huh? Resource costs, and certainly not the costs in human lives...

[Steve Hynd]

It is odd, isn't it...

Regards, Steve