Afghanistan: If We Fight, We Should Pay

Heading for Afghanistan. Are we prepared to win?

Barack Obama has made his case for sending 30,000 more American fighters to Afghanistan. His proposal is contentious. Some critics say that 30,000 are not quite enough, others that they are too much. Who’s right? It’s a close call. Surely, if we up our ante in Afghanistan, we should do so only if we are prepared to win – meaning, as Obama powerfully said in his West Point speech to the nation early this week, we must deny al Qaeda an Afghan (and Pakistani) haven from which to scheme attacks on us. If 30,000 will prove not enough to do that, will we then be willing to up our ante further? Whatever damage we may do to our international credibility and to our relations with Pakistan by pulling out of Afghanistan now, we will do to an even greater degree by leaving the job unfinished (to use Obama’s words) and pulling out later. Therefore: Are we in Afghanistan to win? That is the most critical – in fact, the only – question. If victory is not our goal, then we certainly should not send more troops.

Only the American people can answer this question.. If they are not ready to do what it takes to win in Afghanistan, then clearly we should not get in any deeper and, in fact, should start withdrawing and focus on fighting al Qaeda elsewhere. How do we determine whether Americans really back this war? We ask them to pay for it. We tax them for the added troops. Neither polling, nor op-eds, nor town hall meetings can measure public support reliably. Only a tax can do that. Had Americans been asked to pay – explicitly – for our battle in Viet Nam, we would have been forced, early on, into the realistic debate about what we sought to achieve there and what it would take to do so. Instead, American leaders assured us that we didn’t have to choose between what then was quaintly called “guns and butter.”

Let’s not repeat that mistake. If we want to fight in Afghanistan, we should pay for it.

Rightly opposing new taxes.
Yikes. I already hear the howls of protest and, worse, derision. I know the arguments against a tax – and, ordinarily, enthusiastically would endorse them. First, as conservatives, we rightly reflexively oppose just about every tax, especially new taxes, because taxes produce the income that swells government’s size and intrusiveness. Second, still deep in recession, what we need now are tax cuts, not increases. Third, cutting existing Federal programs, not new taxes, should pay for our Afghan troop surge.

All of these are sound arguments. All of these, in this instance, I reject. First, while every tax is dreadful, conservatives long have argued that less dreadful are what we call user-fees, a tax linked to a specific purpose or service. To be sure, a “war tax” is an unorthodox user fee, yet it can qualify because it is linked directly to the surge in troops. Second, the $30 billion in new taxes to cover the estimated cost of the new troops, relatively, are not a huge sum and thus should inflict limited economic drag, particularly since three-quarters of the nearly $800 billion stimulus program has not yet entered the economy’s pipeline. The third argument is, of course and in theory, irrefutable; trimming other government programs is, by far, by far, the best way to finance war or any other exceptional program or emergency. Yet, reality is – as is well known by anyone who ever has worked in Washington – that at the end of the day, no programs will be cut. Instead, the surge’s cost will be invisible to the public and simply will swell the national debt.

Main case for a tax.
These counter-arguments to the war tax opponents may or may not be persuasive. Maybe, at least, they will dull their case somewhat. At any rate, my main case for the tax relies not on those arguments but on the unavoidable eruption of the heated, contentious debate over a new tax that will force Americans to confront our war in Afghanistan and force them to decide whether or not they support it enough to fight to win.

Our battle against al Qaeda and other terrorists must be waged. Whether Afghanistan remains the place to wage it is not absolutely certain. What is certain is that we cannot wage it successfully without broad public backing. Let’s not replay our Viet Nam mistake. Let’s ask Americans to pay for the war in Afghanistan. If they refuse, let’s get out and fight al Qaeda elsewhere.

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