[R-G] Next Year’s War Costs Estimated at $170 Billion or More

[Anthony Fenton]

Next Year’s War Costs Estimated at $170 Billion or More
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/washington/06cnd-military.html? 
_r=1&oref=slogin

By DAVID STOUT and THOM SHANKER
Published: February 6, 2008

WASHINGTON — The military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan could  
cost $170 billion in the next fiscal year over and above the $515.4  
billion regular Pentagon budget that President Bush has proposed,  
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Wednesday.

Mr. Gates gave that estimate in testimony before the Senate Armed  
Services Committee after cautioning the panel that any estimate would  
be dicey, given the unpredictability of war.

“Well, a straight-line projection, Mr. Chairman, of our current  
expenditures would probably put the full-year cost in a strictly  
arithmetic approach at about $170 billion,” Mr. Gates said in  
response to questions from Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat  
who is the head of the committee.

So, Mr. Levin pressed, “That would be a total then of $685 billion”  
in Pentagon spending for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. “Does  
that sound right?”

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Gates replied. “But as I indicated, I have no  
confidence in that figure.”

Mr. Levin has been a persistent critic of the war in Iraq, and he has  
complained that the Bush administration has been less than  
straightforward about the financial costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan  
campaigns by seeking supplemental funding outside the regular  
Pentagon budget. Congress has gone along with the supplemental  
requests, with members of both parties pledging to give American  
troops whatever they need.

“While the monetary cost is not the most important part of the debate  
over Iraq or Afghanistan, it does need to be part of that debate, and  
the citizens of our nation have a right to know what those costs are  
projected to be,” Senator Levin said.

Mr. Gates said he was concerned that some countries who have pledged  
troops to Afghanistan were not fully meeting their commitments, and  
that he would bring up the subject with his counterparts from other  
NATO countries.

“I think we have to be realistic about the political realities that  
face some of the governments in Europe,” Mr. Gates said. “Many of  
them are coalition governments, some of them are minority  
governments, and they are doing what they think is at the far end of  
what is politically acceptable.”

The secretary added: “There are allies that are doing their part and  
are doing well. The Canadians, the British, the Australians, the  
Dutch, the Danes, are really out there on the line and fighting.”

While Mr. Gates was before the committee, Secretary of State  
Condoleezza Rice was making the same point during a visit to London.

Mr. Gates got a relatively friendly welcome, perhaps in part because  
he has tried to adopt a style less confrontational than that of his  
predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld. Adm. Michael G. Mullen was also  
welcomed warmly by committee members in his first appearance before  
the panel as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

Senator Levin complained, as he has before, about what he sees as the  
failure of the post-Saddam Hussein government in Iraq. “For years,  
the Iraqi leaders have failed to seize the opportunity our brave  
troops gave them,” he said. “It is long past time that the Iraqi  
leaders hear a clear, simple message: we can’t save them from  
themselves; it’s in their hands, not ours, to create a nation by  
making the political compromises needed to end the conflict.”

Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the committee’s ranking  
Republican and one of his party’s most influential voices on military  
matters, did not disagree with Senator Levin on Iraq. “I think by any  
fair standard, that level of progress to date is falling below the  
expectations that we had hoped,” he said. “Senator Levin quite  
appropriately observed that the elected officials in Iraq are simply  
not exercising the full responsibility of the range of sovereignty,  
and that puts our forces in a certain degree of continuing peril and  
risk.”

Mr. Gates said in response to questions that he will soon visit Iraq  
again and confer with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American  
commander, on whether and when to reduce American troop strength to  
the “pre-surge” level of about 130,000.

Also on Wednesday, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the commander of NATO forces  
in Afghanistan, agreed that the international military mission there  
was “under-resourced,” in particular when compared with deployments  
to Iraq.

“Afghanistan, land mass-wise, is half again as big as Iraq, for  
example, if you want to get some relative bearing there,” General  
McNeill said during a Pentagon news briefing.

In Afghanistan, the population is “estimated to be perhaps as much as  
3 million more than Iraq, yet we have, in trying to operate in a  
counterinsurgency environment, only a fraction of the force that the  
coalition has in Iraq,” General McNeill added. “So there’s no  
question it’s an under-resourced force.”

General McNeill said that if the official American military  
counterinsurgency doctrine were applied to Afghanistan, then well  
over 400,000 allied and Afghan security troops would be required. He  
acknowledged the impossibility of fielding a force of that size.

“The trick, then, is to manage the risk that’s inherent in having an  
under-resourced international force and reaching the level of  
capacity at which the Afghan national security forces ought to be,”  
he said, stressing especially the importance of training the local  
police.

The NATO-led security assistance mission has about 40,000 troops in  
Afghanistan, of which 14,000 are American. Separately, the United  
States has 12,000 other troops there conducting counterterrorism and  
support missions. Mr. Gates in recent days signed a deployment order  
for an additional 3,200 marines for temporary duty in Afghanistan.

The general also disputed public assessments that the Afghan  
insurgency was growing, and he cited the number of low- to high-level  
insurgent leaders who were killed or captured. “That number is  
significant,” General McNeill said. “Many of those were jihadists who  
cut their teeth fighting the Soviets. They were good at their skills.  
They’re no longer on the battlefield. That’ll be very helpful.”

Commenting on a recent public debate about skills of various NATO  
nations at waging counter-insurgency missions, General McNeill said  
that “it is probably an incontrovertible truth that if you pull a  
huge alliance together, that the going-in position of different  
nationalities of that alliance, or at least their military forces, is  
somewhat different.”

He acknowledged differences in training, as well as varying political  
pressures from individual home capitals that affect the capabilities  
of those forces in Afghanistan.

Looking to the future, General McNeill predicted an exceedingly large  
opium harvest, and warned that significant portions of narcotics  
profits would go to Taliban and other insurgent activity.