The looming Afghan crash
Source: PBS Voices, 5/17/2011
ASP Fellow Joshua Foust is a featured writer.
By Joshua Foust
One way or another, the war in Afghanistan will eventually wind down. On Tuesday, the Washington Post announced that the Obama administration is seeking to “speed up” its direct talks with the Taliban to end the fighting. By all accounts, there will be a substantial reduction of U.S. forces by the end of 2014, withdrawing upwards of 70,000 troops and support personnel. What happens then? Both Afghanistan and the U.S. stand to face substantial economic disruptions when the war does end.
Withdrawing 70,000 troops from Afghanistan is an enormous undertaking: leaving aside the logistics of moving the people (which really involves packing them onto C-17s and flying them out), there are a host of economic dependencies to consider.
For starters, there are the bases. The Federal Business Opportunities website, a central clearinghouse for new government contracting, lists new base construction contracts worth tens of millions of dollars on almost a daily basis. Looking at the most recent solicitation, for a brigade garrison for the Afghan National Army, the government estimates this single construction project will have an estimated cost of between $100 and $250 million. After 2014, that sort of business will end, and along with it so will hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the defense contractor community.
But it’s not just construction. Once bases are built, they need to be supplied. While most of the media attention to NATO’s supply trucks focuses on the relative minority that are ambushed by the Pakistani Taliban and lit on fire, these trucking companies — almost all owned by Afghans and Pakistanis — make millions of dollars every year. Once NATO shuts down its bases, that revenue will vanish. In the 1990s, these shipping companies (Ahmed Rashid called them the “trucking mafia” in his 2000 book, “Taliban”) made their money through smuggling drugs, illegal gemstones, and timber from Afghanistan to the outside world. They literally stripped the country bare. We can assume they’ll revert to form once the U.S. money spigot runs dry…
