Ironies on the Right

Blind to Contradictions

It is well known that about the only policy area in which conservatives in the US support President Obama is his warmaking. Tea party Republicans have stood pretty much four square behind the US Commander in Chief, with their only criticisms being for his alleged timidity, tentativeness, and an untimely withdrawal plan.

Yet, on the other hand, Tea Party conservatives loathe and despise "big government" and are right on the money when they complain of the genetic and systemic incompetence of government to solve problems. Generally speaking "small government" conservatives see a sharply reduced role for government as legitimate--beyond which government becomes incompetent and more oppressive.

Yet it appears that it is starting to dawn on some clearer thinking heads that there is an inescapable, inherent contradiction between these two conservative positions. If Big Government is both illegitimate and incompetent in the US, why would it suddenly morph into legitimacy and competence in Afghanistan? This question calls into question the sense and reasonableness of counter-insurgency military strategies. Flatly, government-run "nation building" is an oxymoron.

US conservatives are starting to confront the contradictions--yet still are skirting around the issues. One, the Hudson Institute’s Ann Marlowe, who recently completed her sixth “embed” with American troops in Afghanistan, argues for a belated “reckoning” on controversial if prevailing counterinsurgency policy. She writes:

Many of the American soldiers I know in Afghanistan are themselves deeply skeptical of the American non-strategy. And many of these soldiers are Republicans. They often find themselves “enacting governance on the local level,” in the words of Captain Mike Tumlin of the 82nd Airborne, trying to sideline or remove Afghan officials who steal from, or murder and rape the very people they’re supposed to serve, only to see their hard and sometimes bloody work brought to naught by corrupt higher-ups in Kabul. They’re not fighting for a good government against the evil Taliban, but for one evil against another.

She concludes as follows:

Why should Republicans tolerate waste of our tax money, merely because it happens in Afghanistan? Exactly which Republican values do the Karzai brothers—merchants in drugs and explosives, skimmers of contracts and runners of protection rackets—exemplify? Why is it honorable for Republicans to sacrifice the best of our young people for a miserable kleptocracy?

Now she does not quite get to the point. A typical response to her question amongst conservatives would be to call for counter-insurgency to be done better, more efficiently, more ethically. On a good day, conservatives might go further and argue that Afghanistan itself is too poor, too primitive, and too fractured to enable any strategy to work, including counter-insurgency.

But they have not yet unblocked their ears to the question that is screaming out from the rooftops: if conservatives know that government is utterly incapable and incompetent to change the human heart, build solid marriages, create a civil society, and run a public health system in the US why would they believe that it could possibly accomplish such things in Afghanistan?

As it is, the spend of taxpayers' money and the waste is hard to believe.

We’ve spent $51.5 billion to date on the Afghan war, about four years’ worth of that country’s GDP—enough to give every Afghan $2,000 to $2,500. About half of our expenditure has gone to standing up the Afghan National Security Forces. That $25 billion also equals the entire Israeli defense budget for two years.

For what we’ve spent, we could have re-created the Israeli Army, Air Force and Navy in Afghanistan. Only we didn’t. Instead, at enormous cost, we have fielded a marginally competent army and a barely capable police force, both of which lose between 25 percent and 70 percent of their men annually.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than $3 billion has been openly flown out of Kabul Airport since 2007.

It's time US conservatives took their own political ideology more seriously. If not, the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, long a favourite of "small government" conservatives, might come to indicate a condition of exceptional national folly.