The War Addicts: the Pentagon and Military Would Do Almost Anything to Continue Neverending War

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Tue Oct-05-10 04:55 AM
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The War Addicts: the Pentagon and Military Would Do Almost Anything to Continue Neverending War

Perpetual war is in the military and Pentagon's blood -- and they're ready to face down the commander-in-chief to make it continue.

The War Addicts: the Pentagon and Military Would Do Almost Anything to Continue Neverending War
Tomdispatch.com / By Tom Engelhardt

October 3, 2010 | Sometimes it�s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye. On Monday, the Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward�s new book Obama�s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners. As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting to review war policy. It caught in a nutshell the favored �solution� to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it -- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then-Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then-Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others.

Labeled �Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,� it�s a classic of visual wish fulfillment. Atop it is a soaring green line that represents the growing strength of the notoriously underwhelming �Afghan Forces,� military and police, as they move toward a theoretical goal of 400,000 -- an unlikely �end state� given present desertion rates. Underneath that green trajectory of putative success is a modest, herky-jerky blue curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.

The eye-catching detail, however, was the dating on the chart. Sometime between 2013 and 2016, according to a hesitant dotted white line (that left plenty of room for error), those U.S. surge forces would be drawn down radically enough to dip somewhere below -- don�t gasp -- the 68,000 level. In other words, three to six years from now, if all went as planned -- a radical unlikelihood, given the Afghan War so far -- the U.S. might be back close to the force levels of early 2009, before the President�s second surge was launched. (When Obama entered office, there were only 31,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.)

And when would those troops dwindle to near zero? 2019? 2025? The chart-makers were far too politic to include the years beyond January 1, 2016, so we have no way of knowing. But look at that chart and ask yourself: Is there any doubt that our high command, civilian and military, were dreaming of, and most forcefully recommending to the president, a forever war -- one which the Office of Budget and Management estimated would cost almost $900 billion?

Of course, as we now know, the military �lost� this battle. Instead of the 40,000 troops they desired, they �only� got 30,000 from a frustrated president (plus a few thousand support troops the Secretary of Defense was allowed to slip in, and some special operations forces that no one was putting much effort into counting, and don�t forget those extra troops wrung out of NATO as well as small allies who, for a price, couldn�t say no -- all of which added up to a figure suspiciously close to the 10,000 the president had officially denied his war commanders).