Letter from America / Nathaniel Sheppard Jr: US pullout from Afghanistan could cost both countries dearly

For the past 10 years, Afghanistan has been like a kept woman on whom the US lavished about $320 million a month for favors. That tryst is about to start winding down but Uncle Sam, like former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, will likely have to pay for the liaison for some time to come.

The US already has announced plans to begin a drawdown of troops in Afghanistan this summer, after a 10-year anti-terrorist effort that has had spotty results, but a critical Senate report released Wednesday in Washington will put pressure on President Barack Obama to accelerate the pullout.

The report questioned whether the $320 million spent each month to buy Afghanistan’s support for US counterinsurgency efforts through development and stabilization programs was counter productive: fueling corruption, disrupting local markets and creating a dependency the US would have to feed for many years after the pullout.

“The unintended consequences of pumping large amounts of money into a war zone cannot be underestimated,” the report said. “Foreign aid, when misspent, can fuel corruption, distort labor and goods markets, undermine the host government’s ability to exert control over resources, and contribute to insecurity.”

“Spending aid effectively in Afghanistan is extremely challenging, given the security climate, abject poverty, weak indigenous capacity, widespread corruption, and poor governance,” it continued.

The US has spent $19 billion dollars in development aid alone in Afghanistan during the war effort, too much, some say, for a country whose president said just last week that the US was beginning to look like an occupying force. Since the country remains woefully undeveloped, where, they wonder, did the money go?

Despite some US successes in routing pockets of Afghan Taliban from sections of the country, such as with the 30,000-troop surge that began in Marjah in February 2010, Americans are war weary. In the absence of lasting stability in Afghanistan after a 10-year effort, it appears the Taliban has been but pushed from place to place.

Given government and civil corruption that puts Afghanistan right up there with Nigeria as one of the world’s great kleptocracies, the whole effort seems like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

No sooner had the report been released than Republicans and Democrats alike lined up on both sides of the aisle in Congress to call on the president to speedily bring US troops home.

“While the United States has genuine national security interests in Afghanistan, our current commitment, in troops and dollars, is neither proportional to our interests nor sustainable,” said Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the committee’s ranking Republican, said that despite a decade in the country where rough terrain and tribal loyalties make centralized government control unworkable, “we remain in a cycle that produces relative progress but fails to deliver a secure political or military resolution.”

“The more important question is whether we have an efficient strategy for protecting our vital interests that does not involve massive open-ended expenditures and does not require us to have more faith than is justified in Afghan institutions,” he said.

A more rapid pullout than planned, however, is fraught with peril. The already fragile economy could unravel and plunge the country further into chaos. A rapid pullback in aid “could trigger a major economic recession,” the report said.

Acquiescing to US will for money rather than commitment has its price. For Afghanistan, it is dependency. A stupefying 97 percent of Afghanistan’s Gross Domestic Product is tied in some way to the war effort. When Uncle Sam goes, so does its largess. Afghanistan can only make so much from opium production.

Mr. Obama was scheduled to have a teleconference with Afghan president Hamid Karzai Wednesday and a drawdown of US troops with minimal disruption likely is on Mr. Karzai’s mind.

For his part, President Obama does not need another brushfire to put out abroad. A home economy Americans believe is worse than it actually is has sent his approval rating plummeting. The bounce he got for the surprise commando raid next door in Pakistan that took out Osama Bin Laden at the beginning of May has virtually evaporated.

Almost one-half of Americans polled believe the country is headed for another Great Depression although few economists believe the country will even have a double dip recession. The president’s approval rating stands at 41 percent, not the worst for a president at this point in his administration, but not where you want to be this close to an election year.

Afghanistan, Middle East, Persian Gulf and other distractions inhibit his ability to focus on developing new jobs for a work starved public that has begun to turn on him and to find ways to prop up an economy that could be hit by another devastating wave of home foreclosures; great ammunition for Republicans and tea baggers who want to make him a one-term president.

(Nathaniel Sheppard Jr. is a veteran foreign and national correspondent who has worked at The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. He can be reached at: [email protected])