if the US fails in Afghanistan or Iraq, it won't be due to a lack of money
IMO, lack of money early in the Afghanistan and Iraq nation-building exercises will be the key reasons for failure in both places.
In Afghanistan we lost a key and obvious opportunity to absorb the armies of the warlords into a central national army controlled by Karzai. All that was needed in the month after the Taliban defeat was some relatively pitiful salaries to retain and convert some 50,000 warlord troops into a central National army. It would have cost less than $100 million a year to instantly strip the warlords of their armies and establish a strong national army almost overnight. The boneheads that control policy at Defense however, had to start from scratch, training for months a few thousand troops according to American Army standards. So, the warlord troops got back to the warlords, where they are now protecting a thriving heroin-based economy, and don't give a rat's ass about the resurgent Taliban.
In Iraq, the unintended consequences of the looting turned upside down Plan A from Rumsfeld's geniuses (the only existing plan) and it was too much to figure out that a generous dollop of aid up front to give all the looters jobs fixing the infrastructure and picking up garbage would have started reconstruction early in the game and probably short-circuited the nascent guerilla war. But, no, the geniuses were waiting for the gusher of oil revenues to pay for any serious reconstruction and economic revival. Four months later, they are still waiting. Thank God for guys like McCain who boldly proposed a drastic increase in monetary aid (very close to what I said was needed, $20 billion), as well as more troops. This is not what the majority of the American people want according to the latest poll. But, if we listen to the polls, we might as well pack up and leave Iraq now. |
