Wednesday, December 21, 2011

10 Facts About US Withdrawal From Afganistan

By David Swanson 
Posted on 13 December 2011 
Courtesy Of "War Is A Crime"


Fact 1: It is not the case that all US troops will be removed from Afghanistan by 2015.

In his drawdown announcement this past June, President Obama did not say that all US troops would leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014. What he did say was 10,000 troops would be removed by the end of this summer, with 23,000 additional troops leaving at the end of the summer of 2012. After that, according to the President:
our troops will continue coming home at a steady pace as Afghan security forces move into the lead. Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.
Notice that the President did not say that our mission in Afghanistan will end by 2014, only that it will cease to be a "combat" mission and become a "support" mission. What you should be asking yourself is, "what is a support mission?", "how many troops will be required for it?", and "how long will it last?" We will get to these questions shortly. First, it's important to highlight two things:

Fact 2: There is currently no end date for the war in Afghanistan.

Nowhere in the President's speech did he mention a deadline for the full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. No end date for the support mission has been supplied. At present, the expected duration of the war in Afghanistan is indefinite.

Fact 3: Obama's drawdown plan only removes roughly half the number of troops that he introduced into Afghanistan.

When President Obama took office, there were roughly 34,000 US troops in Afghanistan. In two "surges", Obama added to this figure over 66,000 additional troops. By reducing the US troop presence by 33,000, his drawdown plan will leave about 68,000 troops in Afghanistan next September with no timetable and no strategy for their removal.

Fact 4: The "support" mission will not necessarily be small, nor will it be free of combat missions.

A "support" mission sure sounds more reassuring than a combat mission, right? Sounds like only a few troops will remain behind to support the Afghan security forces?
Not if Iraq is any example. The combat mission in Iraq ended in August 2010, at which point troop levels were brought down to 50,000. Today, over a year later, there are still about 45,000 troops left in Iraq. Furthermore, these supposedly non-combat troops have engaged in combat missions and are described as having a "combat capacity" by administration officials, including former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in which they engage in "targeted counterterrorism operations" and work and fight alongside Iraqi security forces. In light of this, "support" seems to be nothing more than a euphemism for extended combat.
Per a previous agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, all US troops are supposed to leave Iraq at the end of this year. That didn't stop the Obama administration from trying to pressure the Iraqi government to extend the deadline, allowing the US to leave up to 10,000 troops indefinitely. Fortunately, this plan has been been abandoned, and all remaining US troops will leave except for 160 attached to the US Embassy. But a similar fight over keeping to a deadline for withdrawal may erupt in the future over Afghanistan.

Fact 5: Reports indicate that the Pentagon wants to keep 25,000 US troops in Afghanistan until at least 2024.

In August, it was reported that the Pentagon is trying to strike a deal with the Afghan government to leave 25,000 US troops in Afghanistan until at least 2024. Keep in mind that there were only 34,000 troops there when Obama took office. That means that the net withdrawal would be a mere 9,000 troops. Furthermore, before 2008, troop levels were at roughly 25,000 or less. So leaving 25,000 troops in Afghanistan would be to merely return to 2007 troop levels.
If this deal goes through, the US will be at war in Afghanistan for at least 13 additional years--that's three more years than we've been at war to this point. Meaning that we wouldn't even be at the half-way mark today, let alone nearing the end!

Fact 6: Keeping 25,000 troops in Afghanistan from 2015 to 2022 would cost approximately $120 billion--that's 10% of the total debt reduction that the Congressional Super Committee is supposed to come up with for that time period.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the current cost of keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan is $694,000 per soldier per year. So, using the CRS number, the cost of keeping 25,000 troops in Afghanistan from 2015 until 2021 would be about $120 billion.
This number is just an estimate, although it is likely to be an underestimate. Costs per soldier in Iraq have increased as troop levels have decreased, in part due to the costs of maintaining the massive US controlled infrastructure being spread among fewer people. A similar situation may arise in Afghanistan.
For more information on this topic, see Robert Naiman's article on the Huffington Post.

Fact 7: Ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could save the US roughly 400,000 jobs.

$200 billion is a conservative estimate of the savings to the federal budget from 2012-2021 of withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq this December (as previously agreed) and withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan after 2014 (as popularly understood.)
In a 2007 paper, Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the University of Massachusetts estimated the impact of an additional billion dollars in military spending on employment compared to other uses, using a standard input-output model of the U.S. economy.
They found that an additional billion dollars in military spending would create 8,555 jobs. In contrast, an additional billion in tax cuts for personal consumption would create 10,779 jobs. Other categories of federal spending examined - education, health, mass transit - created more jobs than tax cuts for personal consumption. [See table 1, page 6.]
Thus, the net effect of moving one billion dollars from the domestic economy to military spending would be to destroy at least 2,224 jobs; moving $200 billion from the domestic economy to military spending would destroy at least 444,800 jobs. Conversely, saving $200 billion by ending the wars as previously scheduled, rather than saving it from the federal budget by using the chained CPI and raising the Medicare retirement age, would save more than 400,000 jobs.
For a more information, see Robert Naiman's original article in the Huffington Post.

Fact 8: The lack of a timetable for withdrawal is a key obstacle in peace negotiations with the Taliban.

While major media outlets were recently declaring the peace process in Afghanistan lost due to the assassination of Berhanuddin Rabbani, the Chairman of the Afghan High Peace Council, they failed to point out that one of the primary barriers to peace has been in place for a long time: the refusal of the US government to establish a timetable for the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. Taliban spokesmen have made it quite clear that peace requires a willingness by the US to leave; but the US military has done just the opposite through its negotiations with the Afghan government to keep 25,000 troops in the country until at least 2024.

Fact 9: There are less than 100 al Qaeda left in Afghanistan--but there are over 670,000 Afghan and international forces there to fight them.

Last year, Leon Panetta said that there were less than 100 members of al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. According to the latest Brookings Institute Afghanistan Index, there are 130,670 international troops in Afghanistan under NATO and Operation Enduring Freedom; 305,516 Afghan Security Forces; 90,000 private Defense Department contractors; and 2,000 private contractors training the Afghan Army. Additionally, there are 150,000 Pakistani troops on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. That's a grand total of 678,195 versus 100. Seems a bit overkill.

Fact 10: There is popular support for ending the war now.

A recent CBS poll indicates that nearly 2/3 of Americans support ending the war in Afghanistan within the next two years. Sixty-two percent said troop levels should be decreased immediately. 38 percent want large numbers to return from Afghanistan within a year; 24 percent said they'd be willing to have troops there for one to two more years; ten percent said they'd accept two to five more years; 18 percent said they'd be willing to have troops there "as long as it takes." Thus, 62% want US troops out in no less than two years. Only one in three Americans think that fighting in Afghanistan is the right thing for the United States to do.

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