Photo:  freakingnews.com 

Way back in 2004, Osama bin Laden reiterated his fundamental strategy against the U.S.—a hemorrhaging of cash through protracted war.  One trillion dollars later, a new book by Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich makes the implicit case that Bin Laden has succeeded in his strategy to a far greater degree than we have in ours.

In 2004, bin Laden released a video to Al-Jazeera in which he said, "We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

The strategy was not new to Bin Laden.   It came from the Soviet war in Afghanistan way back in the 80s. "We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," said the Al Qaeda leader.

Although the war in Afghanistan was only part of the reason the USSR collapsed, it was a factor. 

Now, Professor Bacevich, in Washington Rules, questions whether our militaristic approach to global intervention isn’t breaking the bank here.  “Permanent war” is his term for our current trajectory, and he proclaims the strategy profoundly unsustainable.  This analysis puts him on shared turf with the economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, authors of This Time is Different, which analyses 800 years of economic collapses.

Their title neatly captures their premise:  through the lens of power, hubris blinds the powerful to an apprehension of economic limits.  “Just as an individual can go bankrupt no matter how rich she starts out, a financial system can collapse under the pressure of greed, politics, and profits no matter how well regulated it seems to be,” they write.

What bin Laden saw more clearly than us is that the cost of permanent, multi-front warfare fought against insurgents halfway around the world is unbearably costly for established powers to fight in the long term.  This lesson is far more true in characterizing the U.S. than the former Soviet Union—and thus is well-attenuated to our apparent wealth advantage.  It takes a million dollars to put a precious American soldier on the battlefield.  It cost about a buck a week to back a local insurgent.  We spend $5,000 a second on the war on terror, and have now for ten years.

All this to fight a war against a peripheral country while our real adversaries count the financial and human toll from their safe haven in the nation of our purported allies—Pakistan.

Best-case scenarios leave us on the ground “over there” for up to another four years, but we are not being honest with ourselves here.  Our gains stand to be wiped out as surely as a rising tide takes the sand castle—and bin Laden knows this—if we don’t stick around for another decade or so.  And the results in Iraq, whatever they are, don't really count, since it was the wrong war to begin with, yet it was a war that proved Bacevich's point.

Where’s Waldo?

Beyond that, Al Qaeda is like a toy balloon, the kind you use to make animals out of.  Squeeze it on one place and it bulges elsewhere.  Al Qaeda has the capacity to bulge on demand throughout a good part of the developing world.  We were told we were fighting “Islamo-fascism,” but Bacevich finds fault with the metaphor.  Islamic terrorist is not akin to Naziism.  It does not present an existential threat.  Yet we throw money at the war on terror as if it were.

Bin Laden had no way of knowing the performance of the American economy would underscore his outlook, but it did, and in spectacular fashion, as we ourselves wiped out trillions of dollars in net worth via our casino culture.  But now we are on uncharted turf, exactly the turf that Reinhart and Rogoff say is most dangerous to hubristic empires.  Having thrown a ton of money at a set of domestic and international crises to minimal effect, the temptation is to double down.  Our national defense budget is like a drone on autopilot.  While they prudently suggest that we stay the course on the domestic front to protect our weaker than weak recovery, they note that our debt ratio is at 89 percent of GNP, while 90 percent is considered to be a reading of clear and present danger through 800 years of precedents.

So we have two choices in our warmaking:  fundamentally redefine the so-called war on terror or risk permanent damage to our economic standing in the world.  Only hubris keeps us on our present course, our God-granted status as keepers of the world’s brethren—on our terms.

What we must do is give up on Afghanistan and decouple our military efforts from conventional geography.  We need to quit squeezing the balloon in one place.  We need to respond with limited strikes on a global basis to always keep our adversaries guessing about what constitutes a safe haven.  This means more dirty war to be sure, but on a far more limited scale than these ridiculous forays to the edges of the known universe, where tribal politics will trump our geopolitical kingmaking any day of the week.

And we need to cut the budget on the war on terror by half, at minimum.

We need to enlist local talent in a war by proxy in lawless Northern Pakistan.  We need to put a much larger price on bin Laden’s head and leave it at that.  Stable government in Afghanistan?  Go fish.  It’s not our issue.  We back the idiot every time.  And the moment some local guy becomes our idiot he is a marked man.  We can’t win this thing without going broke.

As to nuclear Pakistan, that is another question, one that requires the cooperation of the civilized world community in the same way Iran requires such attention.  But who, beside, presumably, God, appointed us the sole superpower?  Enough already!  Take off the cape, dude, your house is going to be repossessed.

Inexhaustible wealth doesn’t exist.  Engaging in useless nation-building is one of the quicker ways to prove it.  Still, with economic power such as ours, it takes decades.  And we have just completed one.

As side note, before we get carried away with "Obama's war" and "Obama's economy" tropes, let's not forget that President George W. Bush increased the national debt by 71.9 percent.  And that was during the good times.

Without the economic meltdown I don’t think we would have arrived at this juncture so quickly.  So bin Laden shouldn’t get too cocky.  He just got lucky that we decided to trash our own economy.  But the national debt is approaching a crisis level and if we don’t recalibrate, this whole thing could come crashing down in the next few years like a bad mortgage.  As Bacevich points out, permanent war stinks.