Will the war on credit out-spend the war on terror? Or will one crash bringan end to another? Washington, London, Baghdad and Kabul last week sawconcerted moves by the western powers to disengage from their seven-yearwar on militant islam. When it comes to truly stupefying public spending,even super-policemen cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.
So far the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars still far out-strips thatof the credit crunch rescues of the past fortnight. The internationaleconomist, Joseph Stiglitz, last year put the cost of Iraq alone at threetrillion dollars, though he did impute the value of lives lost and otherinvestment opportunities foregone. But even official figures are nowrunning close to a trillion dollars. Such money might seem tolerable whenit was "skim" from the west's unprecedented two decades of wealth. Withnational budgets collapsing into debt on all sides, they are simplyunaffordable.
Hence the onrush of realism. Last Wednesday, America reached adraft agreement with the Baghdad government of Nouri al-Maliki, to bringAmerican troops under Iraqi sovereignty at the end of this year and toleave Iraq, on some shape or form, by 2011. Two days earlier the Britishgovernment agreed with Maliki's statement that its 4,100 troops in thecountry were "not necessary" and should also leave soon, possibly nextyear.
As so often before, an invading power sucked into the vortex ofoccupation is now crafting a way of declaring victory and departing. TheAmerican election campaign offers a crucial rite of passage, with JohnMcCain declaring Iraq a "success" and the recent "surge" a triumph.American voters overwhelmingly want to get out. They have even found ageneral, David Petraeus, whom they believe can deliver that outcome.
Petraeus's surge, a delicate mix of high-intensity policing,tactical alliances with enemies and cool diplomacy with Shia politicians,has capitalised on a cruder syndrome, sheer exhaustion.
Talking to Petraeus in London last month, I found him not just intelligentbut extraordinarily hesitant for a soldier. His answer to any questionabout how he intended to progress the conflict with a crisp "by agreement."Yet his current standing down of 80 per cent of the Sunni "awakening"militias is highly risky. The movement of insurgents north to Mosul and theKurdistan border is full of foreboding.
Iraq is still the world's most violent and precarious nation (afterSomalia), and its infrastructure is not back to pre-invasion levels. Therecould hardly be a more damning indictment of the west's incompetence atnation-building. But America's voters and half-hearted coalition partnershave had enough. Iraqis too have had enough. It is a matter of how toretreat in reasonably good order.
Most tragic is that the painful lessons of Iraq have yet to be learned byNato and American commanders in Afghanistan. Even the otherwise sane BarackObama campaign team is in denial over that war, where the same belligerenceagainst the insurgents and reckless use of air power fuels rebellion andacts as a magnet for terrorists from all over the globe.
Briefings in 2006 by the gung-ho Nato commander, Sir David Richards (nowhead of the British army), seem a distant fantasy. His talk was all ofMalaya and winning hearts and minds, as if any mention of Iraq was beneathhis dignity. Now Vietnam is a better parallel, with talk of needing evermore troops to establish security. As in Vietnam there is the daily use ofkill-rates and assassinations of enemy leaders to imply impending victory.
That said, the reassessments pouring out of Kabul are devastating. A leakedpresidential report talks of a "downward spiral" in the war against theTaliban. The head of the American joint chiefs of staff, Admiral MikeMullen, told Congress much America was not winning, echoing similar phrasesfrom the CIA. The British ambassador in Kabul, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles,reportedly gave the Foreign Office the gloomiest possible account of "theworsening security situation," and the corrupt state of the Kabulgovernment.
The reckless use of force along the border alienates the Pakistangovernment, without whom any curtailment of the uprising is impossible.Westerner policy fails to understand what is apparent to any visitor toIslamabad, that Pakistan has a massive vested interest in not alienatingthe semi-autonomous tribes along the Afghan border.
The Afghan insurgency is widespread, tribal and conducted by the world'stoughest guerrillas of both mountain and plain, the Pashtun. They willnever be beaten. They would prefer to hold sway only over their ownuplands, but the war has drawn them into a wider, and to them nobler,conflict with the hated west, making them easy prey for the ideologicalwarlords of al-Qaeda.
Policy in Afghanistan has gone haywire since the heady days of 2001, whenit was to be a template for liberal interventionism. As a result, withpainful slowness, Nato is sketching the scenario of withdrawal, even behinda smokescreen of force enhancement.
The code is that we must "talk to the Taliban." Thus accorded the status ofworld power, this murky entity is in reality a roaming coalition of clansand opium traders along the length of the Pakistan border. Itsonce-horrific image is being carefully softened by western spokesmen, aspurportedly ready to bring order to the south and east of the country. TheTaliban are suddenly not the problem but the solution.
Waging war in Afghanistan ranks with marching on Moscow in the canon ofmilitary folly. Yet such was the bombast of the Bush/Blair alliance thatthis folly was widely supported by liberal opinion in Britain andelsewhere. Now others must end it, and end the killing of tens of thousandsof Britons, Americans and Afghans, a slaughter now spreading over theterritory of the world's most unstable nuclear power.
It is obscene to justify this carnage and this danger by citing a fewrebuilt Afghan schools and roads, as British ministers persistently do.This country will never be at peace, and Pakistan never safe, until thewest withdraws its troops, and probably not even then. We shall leaveanother nation in ruins.