How deep are America's pockets?

In all the fascinating and depressing detail of Prospect’s recent Afghan coverage (“The case for an Afghanistan inquiry,” September; “A culture of silence,” October) one fact screamed out at me. Nothing to do with whether or not we should hold an inquiry into this country’s involvement (though we like inquiries on the Today programme) nor anything to do with the “transition”; no, my eye was caught by a single sentence, a quotation remembered by Bronwen Maddox.

It was our former man in Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, talking about the Afghan government of Mohammad Najibullah, installed by Moscow. I had always lazily assumed that Najibullah was done for as soon as the Russians left. But Cowper-Coles makes what I think is a vital historical point:

“[After 1989] The Russians left behind a regime which not only survived but also succeeded in defeating the insurgency which the Americans and British were continuing to support. It collapsed only when, in 1992, the Soviet Union itself collapsed, ending the external subsidy on which every Afghan government in modern times has depended.”

Aha. An Afghan government, funded from abroad, even if unloved in much of the nation, can survive a lengthy Taliban onslaught. But when funding is cut, the government’s survival can be measured in days and hopes of peaceful negotiations are held only by Afghan Quakers, if such folk exist. Najibullah stayed in Kabul. I don’t think he was a Quaker but he was an optimist, and was rewarded as previous optimists have been rewarded in Kabul. He was castrated by the Taliban before they dragged him through the streets and strung him up.

The money, in other words, matters. And the money will come, in the years ahead, mainly from the US. So America’s willingness to pay is the pivot around which all future Afghan policy will have to dance. If the pivot stays in place the policy can be adjusted and refined. But if the pivot is taken away?

In Washington the other day, to cover the Congressional bloody nose being delivered to the Obama administration over Syria, I got talking about Afghanistan to a Senate aide I know. We had both read a pithy piece in Foreign Affairs by the analyst Stephen Biddle. Biddle is an Afghan expert and he has been in the past very closely involved with US military strategy in Afghanistan, serving as advisor to both Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus. Both men are, of course, hors de combat these days, but the Biddle piece may well reflect their thinking. And it was blunt. The Afghan war will go on after 2014, when the westerners leave, and a grinding stalemate between the Afghan national security forces and the Taliban will be played out. Then, Biddle suggests: “The Afghan national security forces can probably sustain this deadlock but only as long as the US Congress pays the multibillion dollar annual bills needed to keep them fighting. The war will thus become a contest in stamina between Congress and the Taliban.”

Biddle’s point had impressed my friend in Congress because he firmly believes that the foreign policy choices being made by members of the House of Representatives recently (the Syria non-vote only the latest) suggest that the stamina of Congress—or at least the lower house where the money is doled out—has already been found wanting. The Syria debate (or non-debate) was quite an eye opener for those on the interventionist wing of both American parties. The mood in the country is strongly against military action where clear goals and interests are not readily perceptible; but more importantly the inboxes of House members have been filling up with another wail of complaint: we can’t afford to do this stuff any more.

Although America’s annual budget deficits are on the way down, the panic over the overall national debt has affected thinking among supporters of both the main parties. Questions about value for money (is it better to spend four to six billion dollars a year in order to buy time for Afghanistan?) become overshadowed by questions about the money tout court. The effect is to undermine the interventionists, whether that intervention is military or financial or diplomatic. It is not quite isolationism—most Americans understand that a withdrawal from the world would be damaging to them—but it is very wary of shouldering burdens that, seen from mainstreet America, need not be shouldered. It is foreign policy pickiness.

Of course America could easily afford to pay the Afghan bills forever. It pays military aid to Israel—admittedly a little less than would be required in Afghanistan, but still billions—but in the case of Israel it pays the money to a nation with a constituency in the US and a cause many Americans readily associate with. Afghanistan is no Israel. That could be its biggest challenge.