collective on foreign affairs 21/08/2022
1. A YEAR ON, the Taliban savours victory, while other Afghans pay the price.
After two decades of insurgency, the Taliban exhausted the world’s most powerful military and their NATO allies, which agreed to withdraw from the country in a deal signed in February 2020.As Western troops were concluding their withdrawal last summer, the Taliban oversaw the rapid surrender, defeat or co-option of Afghan security forces — forces they saw as aiding a foreign occupation.
Afghans are surviving in relative security for the first time in decades. Aid groups reach areas that were previously off-limits. Primary-age boys and girls are attending schools in greater numbers because it is now safe for them to go.
The Taliban have raised some $2.5 billion through customs revenue and mining; they are shipping coal to Pakistan.
However, Afghanistan crashed into crisis after the Taliban seized power. Western aid that propped up the former Afghan government was cut off. Sanctions on Taliban leaders — now in government — dried up most international trade and banking when Washington froze Afghanistan’s central bank assets held in the U.S.
Hsiao-Wei Lee, deputy director for the World Food Program in Afghanistan spoke to NPR in July, 2022.Afghans needing food aid roughly doubled to 20 million people, about half the population. Around 6.6 million need urgent assistance to survive. While the U.N. has spent some $4 billion on Afghanistan since the takeover, it is less than half of the U.N.’s appeal for Afghanistan this year, said Ramiz Alakbarov, the U.N.’s resident and humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan.
2. THE WAR
Allies of the United States borne significant costs in the post-9/11 wars, in terms of both dollars and lives. Besides the United States, the top five countries which despatched troops to the war in Afghanistan were the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Canada. The United Kingdom in particular supplied roughly two to three times the troops of the other top contributing allies when considered relative to its population. Indeed, British and Canadian troops put their lives at risk at twice the rate of American troops, when computed as a percentage of each country’s peak deployment. The top contributing allies lost over a thousand lives in the U.S.-led conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
When measured as a percentage of their annual baseline military expenditures, the United Kingdom and Canada spent roughly half as much on Afghanistan as the United States. And when measured in terms relative to their respective Gross Domestic Products (GDPs), the U.S. provided less foreign aid than did the U.K., and about the same amount as Germany and Canada.
Western allies’ primary interest in making their significant contributions was not their own security, but colluding to cohesive their relationships with the U.S. hegemonic imperial power.
3. COSTS of WAR
Over the 20-year period of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, the U.S. Department of Defense paid various companies about $108 billion in contracts for work performed in the country. This is in addition to the trillions of dollars spent on Department of Defense contracts performed in the U.S. over that period – and does not include other goods and services produced in the U.S. and used in the war in Afghanistan, such as weapons.
Even this figure is just a fraction of the over $14 trillion in Pentagon spending since the start of the war in Afghanistan in total, with one-third to one-half of the total going to military contractors.
Over one-third of the contract spending went to “undisclosed” recipients – domestic and foreign businesses which are not publicly identifiable in the contracting databases – USASpending.gov and the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS).
Of the $108 billion spent in Afghanistan from fiscal years 2002-2022, over 40 percent went to the 14 largest companies, which each received over one billion dollars in total contract spending, with the largest receiving over $13.5 billion. There were also thousands of smaller contracts.
4 PROFITS of WAR
The U.S. war-machine manager Pentagon has spent over $14 trillion since the start of the war in Afghanistan, with one-third to one-half of the total going to military contractors.
A large portion of these contracts – one-quarter to one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years – have gone to just five major corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.
The $75 billion in Pentagon contracts received by Lockheed Martin in fiscal year 2020 is well over one and one-half times the entire budget for the State Department and Agency for International Development for that year, which totaled $44 billion.
Weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades, employing, on average, over 700 lobbyists per year over the past five years. That is more than one for every member of the United States’ Congress.
Numerous companies took advantage of wartime conditions – which require speed of delivery and often involve less rigorous oversight – to overcharge the government or engage in outright fraud. In 2011, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that waste, fraud and abuse had totaled between $31 billion and $60 billion :
Even as the U.S. was then reducing the size of its military footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are exaggerated estimates of the military challenges posed by China becoming the new rationale of choice in arguments for keeping the Pentagon budget at historically high levels. Military contractors will continue to profit from the expansive and inflated spending.
5 LESSONS of WAR
Since 9/11, U.S. media, politicians, and security experts have produced a deluge of pro-war content, establishing and further normalizing a paradigm that treats war-making as the natural response to terror attacks. At the same time, research has shown that government violence against people in the name of counterterrorism, wartime destruction of infrastructure, and long-term U.S. military presence abroad breed ill-will toward the United States and broaden support for the same groups that the U.S. post-9/11 wars officially aim to eliminate.
By reviewing relevant literature from scholars and think tanks, this short article shall try to explore – and present – succintly some non-military models of counterterrorism with outlines of eleven paradigms and the implicit assumptions of the states and experts who employ them about the problem of terrorism. The graphic below separates state-led models of counterterrorism into the categories of “coercive,” “proactive,” “persuasive,” “defensive,” and “long-term ” :
It needs to be said that deaths caused by governments in the name of counterterrorism vastly exceeds deaths caused by militant groups who use terror tactics. In fact, between 1995 and 2019, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has calculated that 3,455 U.S. citizens were killed in terror attacks. In contrast, the Costs of War data has shown that the U.S. post-9/11 wars have directly killed over 929,000 people on planet Earth.
Yet, at the same time, between 2001 and 2021, the U.S. poured more than US$8 trillion into counterterrorism warfare.
The Biden administration presentation of a staggering US$813 billion proposal for the U.S. national defense only generously engenders the military-industrial complex war machines. This significant disbursement is more than at the heights of the Korean or Vietnam war years. This is, in fact, even US$100 billion more than at the peak of the Cold War.
This astonishing amount is, by any measure, more than two-and-a-half times what China spends. It also represents a dawning fact: the equivalent national security budgetary amounts of the next nine countries, including China and Russia.
The Pentagon war machinery is just one core element in an ever more expansive and expensive American warfare state. Together with other military, intelligence, and internal-security expenditures to the Pentagon’s endowment. The U.S. national security hegemonic imperialism budget equates a mind-boggling US$1.4 Trillion.
The Pentagon had fabricated stories to justify the long war in Afghanistan where military commanders often made grandiose claims of the “progress” they were making on the battlefield. The prolonging of the war – including U.S.-led subversion of two decades prior to the Afghanistan War – where the CIA spent 5 to 6 billion dollars to bleed the Soviet Union besides capturing 60% of heroin for the U.S. market – only increment capital accumulation of the military-industrial complex corporate finance-monopoly capitalism. That its ruling military and government officials lie in pursuit of their narrow self-interests.
EPILOGUE
There is an urgent need, more than ever, for reframing predominant understandings of global security to other planetary issues of existential threats during this epoch of ecological-economics-epidemiological moment posed by climate change, economic disparity and inequality, healthcare insecuritry and equity, too.
VIEW : Can We Demilitarize the Economy? Loosening the Grip of the Pentagon, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, July 20, 2022.
Firestorms 