Escalator to Hell

Good money after bad.

by David Faris

On Dec. 1, President Obama announced, to the dismay of his party's base, that beginning in early 2010, the U.S. would dispatch an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. In addition to representing the bitter fruit of the left's "we should be focusing on Afghanistan instead of Iraq" critiques of the Bush administration, Barack Obama's choice is puzzling. A halfhearted escalation is, of course, transparently bad policy. Military experts believe it would take more than 600,000 troops to secure a country the size of Afghanistan, a force the U.S. simply can't muster.

So why would Obama, with such an ambitious domestic-policy agenda at stake, choose to sacrifice his presidency at the altar of Afghanistan?

Cynics might reach for the "diversionary theory of war," which argues leaders will rally their citizens around the flag with foreign adventures. On the surface, this seems plausible: With unemployment at 10 percent, adventurism abroad might sound like the solution. But Barack Obama, who studied international relations at Columbia University, surely is smart enough to realize that the leaders who launch or expand wars to distract the public have met with unpleasant ends. A bigger challenge for this theory is that not enough voters seem to care about Afghanistan to make it a distraction from anything. The war is not about aggrandizement or irredentism — the recovery of lost national territory — but rather about a war on terror whose ultimate goal remains maddeningly vague.

An even more cynical explanation is the pursuit of natural resources. Provocateurs like Michael Moore have charged for years that America's Central Asia policy is animated by "pipeline politics." The trouble with this explanation is that even if it were true, the U.S. would almost certainly cut a deal with the Taliban in the same way that it deals with the Saudis. And Afghanistan is not the only unstable Central Asian country such a pipeline would have to traverse — hello, Pakistan — making this particular pipe dream hardly worth the effort.

Still others might explain the Afghan adventure with the logic of imperialism: Imperial powers are constantly extending their frontiers and acquiring new interests that are defined as vital. Under this framework, having defined the stability of strategically unimportant Afghanistan as vital to America's national security, the country must be secured or abandoned to America's enemies in the Global War on Terror. And because instability in Afghanistan might spread to the anarchic badlands of nuclear-armed Pakistan, the U.S. has acquired not one, but two new security frontiers.

A more plausible explanation is what social scientists call "path dependency," or the idea that current policies and institutions are deeply reliant on decisions made in the past. Even bad policies develop lobbies that support them, employ thousands in both the public and private sector and enjoy the support of opinion leaders. In other words, Obama is unlikely to have chosen this path in Afghanistan himself, but faced with the Hobson's choice of either withdrawing or escalating, he chose to escalate, the same way a poker player is told to "raise or fold." He forgot the important corollary: Don't send good money on a futile quest to recover the bad.

The unfortunate reality of American politics, which defies any one set of explanations, is that we can light trillions of dollars on fire and dance merrily around the bonfire of our own wealth, as long as that money is spent blowing things up Over There. Spend that cash on health insurance for needy Americans, and you're a socialist.

Just as with the Bush administration, dangerous delusions of omnipotence are being married to a total misunderstanding of the actual threat to national security.

Obama campaigned on a return to a kind of enlightened realism, the idea that America's foreign policy should be governed by the pursuit of national interests, and that human rights and democracy can't be imposed from abroad. But he has so far governed as if an understanding of the limits of American power was the same kind of meaningless happy talk that animated his promises to renegotiate Nafta.

The developing path dependency under the Obama administration is one of a permanent imperial war. Obama has forgotten that when you're lost, it's easier to double back rather than to keep driving, making wrong turn after wrong turn.

David Faris goes all-in, all the time. E-mail him at david.faris@gmail.com.