Something that I think gets underplayed in coverage of the Afghanistan debate is the extent to which our commitment to Afghanistan has already escalated substantially in the recent past. In his recent report for the Carnegie Endowment, Gilles Dorronsoro cites this data from Amy Belasco’s classic September 2009 Congressional Research Service page-turner “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11″ (PDF):
One point here is that we now seem to be looking at the consequences of a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to Afghanistan. Maybe if we’d just been spending $30-$40 billion a year from the get-go the situation never would have deteriorated to the point where we’re looking at appropriations of $170 billion and rising. Another point is that it’s a little bit odd that the big escalation debate is happening now, since any further increases in expenditures will probably be smaller than the increase that already happened back when nobody was paying attention.
A third, loosely related point, is that the question “how much are we spending on the war in Afghanistan” is a surprisingly difficult research question. You would think this would be the kind of thing that hardly requires a CRS report, but there’s no more straightforward way for members of congress to figure out what they’ve appropriated than to have someone research it. And it’s full of sentences like “In a recent report, GAO raised questions about whether DOD war cost reporting accurately captures the split between Afghanistan and Iraq” and so forth. The whole issue is surprisingly murky.
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