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Wednesday, December 11, 2019

The United States’ Perpetual War in Afghanistan


Why Long Wars No Longer Generate a Backlash at Home


By Tanisha M. Fazal and Sarah Kreps
Foreign Affairs 

Aug 20, 2018 - In October, the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan will turn 17 (now 18, --ed). The human and material costs of what has become the United States’ longest-ever war are colossal. More than 2,000 U.S. military personnel have been killed and over 20,000 have been injured. The UN estimates that nearly 20,000 Afghan civilians have been killed and another 50,000 injured since 2009 alone. The United States has spent some $877 billion on the war. The Trump administration’s recent initiative to seek direct peace talks with the Taliban—a first since the start of the war in 2001—highlights that Washington is actively looking for new ways to wind down its involvement in the conflict. But why has the U.S. intervention lasted so long in the first place?

Part of the answer is that Afghanistan’s toxic mix of “state collapse, civil conflict, ethnic disintegration and multisided intervention has locked it in a self-perpetuating cycle that may be simply beyond outside resolution,” as Max Fisher and Amanda Taub summarized in a New York Times post. But their diagnosis does not speak to a critical dimension of the conflict: namely, how the relative indifference of the U.S. public has allowed the war to drag on.

In theory, leaders in a democracy have incentives to heed public preferences or risk being voted out of office, which means that public opposition to a war makes its continuation untenable. Yet when it comes to Afghanistan, the U.S. public has favored the status quo at best and expressed deep ambivalence at worst. 

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Why the Pentagon Says It Needs Low-Yield Nukes

The W76-2 warhead is a new, low-yield nuclear weapon. The Pentagon believes other countries—especially Russia—could use low-yield nukes early in a conflict, so it needs its own.The W76-2 has an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, or 10,000 tons of TNT, or less.



From the Dept of Very Bad Ideas: The military thinks a smaller bomb is essential for deterring—and fighting—adversaries.

By Kyle Mizokami
Popular Mechanics

Dec 5, 2019 - The Pentagon reaffirmed its determination to field a new nuclear weapon designed to allow the U.S. to match Russian and Chinese nukes on the battlefield. In an interview with Seapower magazine, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood stated that the nukes are necessary to counter Russian plans to use low-yield nuclear weapons early in a conflict, frightening its enemies into a ceasefire. According to Seapower:

“Rood said the need for the new low-yield weapons came from intelligence reports of Russian emphasis on the use of nuclear weapons earlier in a conflict, “and the mistaken belief that they have the ability to use a low-yield nuclear weapon earlier in the conflict in a way to deter response.” He cited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public statements advocating the early use of low-yield nuclear weapons “as a way of deterring an adversary.”

What kind of scenario is Rood thinking about? Imagine Russia launched a blitzkrieg-style attack on Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, or Lithuania. Russia quickly conquers all four countries before NATO can effectively muster a response. While NATO assembles a reaction force, Russia explodes a small, low-yield nuclear weapon at the Polish border. The detonation would serve warning that Russia was now prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend its conquest, forcing NATO to choose between standing down or using nukes of its own.

The Pentagon thinks that having small, low-yield nuclear missiles like the W-76-2 would allow NATO to match Russia’s first use of a low-yield device, meeting Moscow small nuke for small nuke. The current lack of a smaller, missile-launched nuclear weapon means that the alliance would be forced to consider using a larger nuke to retaliate, escalating the crisis.