Missed Opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan

Great Debates
1

No, this is not about how we can’t find Osama, didn’t send enough troops, enough equipment, or any of the other common complaints about what’s gone wrong. It’s about some fairly simple things that we could have done which would have improved life for everybody (and certainly would make some aspects of the insurgency easier to deal with).

First, and foremost, the construction of prefabricated housing factories in both countries. Not only would this save some money, give the locals jobs and houses, but also it would ensure that the houses were environmentally friendly, cheap to heat and cool, and plentiful. Additionally, it would encourage the development of decent, affordable housing that could be sold in the US and the rest of the world.

Next, wire every building with fiberoptic cable and wireless capability (for redundancy). The guaranteed market would help drive down the manufacturing costs for the stuff and provide a proving ground so any kinks in such a system could be worked out, thus making future widespread deployment cheaper and easier.

Require all new vehicles imported to both countries to be hydrogen/flex fuel powered. Car makers claim that lack of demand is one of the things that makes this stuff so expensive, well, there’s your demand. It’s also a much smaller market place than the US, so working out any kinks in the fuel distribution system can be worked out faster.

Develop a SuperGrid for distributing both electrical energy and hydrogen. Again, this offers the benefits of a ready market, so manufacturers can invest in the equipment necessary to begin production. Also, since the grid would need to be buried, it would make it more difficult to be targeted by insurgents.

Equip all buildings with solar/wind/geothermal power generating systems. Once more, this drives down the cost of developing such things, it also lessens the needs for a centralized power generating station, as well as reduces the impact of terrorists blowing up said powerplant.

Just doing those things would make a big improvement for everybody, both in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Would it solve the insurgency problem? Probably not, but it certainly would make things more difficult for them. One of their reasons for targeting the power grid is that it makes life miserable for everyone. Building redundacy into the system takes one weapon out of their arsenal.

2

Just a couple questions before getting into whether or not these are good ideas:

  1. Are you suggesting that the US impose these requirements on Iraq, and if so, how would we go about doing that?

  2. How much would each of these things cost?

3

The way things are in Iraq at the moment, we’re lucky if we can put up a Porta-Potty and have it stay put for more than a week.

4

Well, I don’t necessarily think that we’d need to impose these things on the countries. Remember both of them expected us to fix their countries after we finished blowing them up and part of our problem is that we haven’t really done that. Offering them technology more advanced/better than your average First Worlder has available to them, would be a strong selling point, I’d think. Some of the ideas I’ve suggested (or ones similar to them) are going to come about eventually, anyway, so we’d be offering to give them a “great leap forward” (to borrow a phrase from Chairman Mao). In the early days of the occupation, we could have declared these things by fiat, and then when the countries set up their own governments, they could have decided to continue with them or not.

I don’t know an exact figure, but I would say at least 10% more than what it would have cost us to rebuild the countries if we hadn’t hired the world’s shadiest contractors to do most of the work that’s been done to date in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s another benefit we’d have gotten out of this, Haliburton would have been almost totally cut out of the deal, and we’d have had lots of job creation here in the US as new companies sprang up to take advantage of the new technologies and opportunities that this would have presented.

5

I’m guessing it would cost between $10k and $20k to fix up a family of 5 with solar generated electricity. If we assume 5M such families in Iraq (population 25M), that would cost between $50B and $100B. Add on municipal buildings, schools, etc, and we’re probably talking twice that amount.

As for the req’t about cars, given the approximately 50% unemployment rate, I have to wonder how many new cars there are in the market relative to existing cars from pre-war times. Maybe 10-20%? If we were to subsidize that, it would probably be triple the cost of the solar initiative.

I dunno. These would be wonderful if they were in place, but I don’t see how we would get them in place.

6

Not necessarily. One of the things that keeps the price of solar panels high is the lack of demand. Increase demand and the price will spike for a short period of time, then begin to drop as more factories are built. Also, with that much cash suddenly pouring into the industry, they’re going to have a lot more money available to research better methods of manufacturing and the like. Concievably, the government could wind up paying the cost you estimate, but once the build up effort winds down, there will no doubt be tons of inexpensive panels on the market, thus encouraging their adoption by larger number of people. So even if it did turn out to be a much higher cost for the government, there would be benefits to be had for everyone.

Well, we could assume that by doing the things I’ve suggested that the demand for new cars would increase because more people would be employed, but even if that didn’t happen, I’m reasonably sure that both the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan need government vehicles, and they probably don’t want to buy a used Yugo for official use.

Well, it’s certain that we won’t get them with the current Administration in the White House, nor do any of the prospective Administrations seem likely to do such a thing, I’ll admit.

7

The most basic problem is that a benevolent-minded America would never have invaded in the first place. So, an America that would do as you have suggested would never be in a position to do so. Not rebuilding, or using the rebuidling as an excuse to hand over wealth to war profiteers is implicit in the fact of the invasion itself.

8

But still the Iraqis would be asking “apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order … what have the Americans ever done for us?”

9

Kill lots of them for no good reason ? Any attempt to win over the Iraqis has to deal with that little problem. A new house won’t make someone fond of you if the old one was blown up with Mom and Dad inside.

10

I never really liked Mon & Dad. In a desert country, I’d trade them for good AC and reliable power.

But that’s just me.

Seriously, back to the OP, the US and Haliburton and KBR haven’t been able to build a decent garage there.

Missed opportunities? The US MIGHT have saved the disaster if, as your OP noted, bought Iraqi materials and hired Iraqis to do the work. But the whole crazy reconstruction “plan” was a neo-con pipe dream, executed by politicians incompetent and even disdainful of their own jobs, along with their chummy corporate pals who got the sweetheart no-bid deals. So the Iraqis were fucked.

The loyal Bushies even gave up the option of rational discussion and debate about how to solve occupation and reconstruction problems when they fired General… Shinsecki? BEFORE the war. For claiming we would need 400,000 or more soldiers to take and control Iraq – so WE were fucked.

After that happened, there was a kind of inevitability to a situation where understrength numbers of occupiers restrict themselves to enclaves and Green Zones, defacto ceding large portions of the country to an organizational vaccuum. They must have imagined they could retain control with smart bombs, missiles and artillery. Well – ok, they imagined the soldier’s biggest problems would be keeping gun barrels clear of the flower stems of the daisies or WTF being thrown by grateful and welcoming Iraqi citizens.

Missed opportunities? Can we start in about 1999?

11

While I don’t have any poll numbers handy, I’d be willing to bet that at least 90% of the planet was okay with us invading Afghanistan, it was when we cooked up the fictional WMDs to invade Iraq that the problems started.

Mind you, I think we could have gotten the majority of the planet on our side about invading Iraq if we had made a habit of wiping out genocidal dictators before this in places like Rwanda and the Sudan. Of course, since those places weren’t oozing oil, we didn’t.

Nor do I think that were somebody in power to get suddenly get a clue and start doing the things I posted that it would be all for naught. We wouldn’t erase all the hard feelings we’ve generated, but we’d go a damn sight farther in regaining some of the respect we’ve lost than what we’re doing now.

12

You’re right; I forgot that this thread is about both Afghanistan and Iraq. I do think that it would have been possible to win over Afghanistan ( and that invading it was reasonable under the circumstances ), or at least leave them feeling neutral about us. Although it would require a quite different crew of folks in charge.

13

When my brother was in Afghanistan, he said he saw missed opportunities at every turn. A few examples-

  1. We were supposedly pretty close to finishing off the Taliban, but suddenly redirected our focus to Iraq, thus ensuring that while we got rid of a lot of top guys, there were plenty of others waiting to step up into the vacuum we left. Taliban-era guys still run that country- they may call themselves warlords or whatever, but it’s “meet the new boss…”

  2. The money- he would walk by fields of pot plants and opium poppies that boggled his mind- if a stoner were to open up his High Times centerfold and see these plants, he would have a heart attack. No one was allowed to touch a thing, because that was outside of their mandate. So, we left boundless sources of income available to the bad guys.

  3. The populace- these people have seen foreigners killing their people for decades- the average Afghan may just be tired of having other people (the Soviets and us) attempting to change their country… Although my brother and his unit were able to befriend a six year old herder who drove animals by their cave most days, as well as employing a fantastic Afghan chef who was deported from the US after 9/11 because of an expired visa…

Bottom line, what did we set out to do in Afghanistan again?

14

Nothing, really. The point was to go through the motions of dealing with Osama, while getting on to the real goal, Iraq.