When talking about Afghanistan, I have described a cycle of senior officers getting their tickets punched with combat citations, contractors making obscene profits, and then those senior officers securing comfortable sinecures with these same contractors.
It leads to a 20-year cycle of expensive failure which can be called, (here comes the term) a, "Self licking ice cream cone."
This goes a long way toward defining the US failure in Afghanistan:
There is a rapidly growing political demand for making American officials accountable for the failures of the Afghanistan War, with a focus now on the military leadership and top generals’ role in keeping forces there for 20 years despite all the signs they knew the war was unwinnable.
One indication of a new political stage for the issue is the fact that Afghanistan War veterans Republican Joe Kent, running for a House seat in Washington state, and Democrat Lucas Kunce, running for a Senate seat in Missouri, have both called for such accountability, questioning the war’s continuation despite evidence it could not be won. Kunce has said that the “right call” would have been to get out of Afghanistan in 2002 or 2003. Kent has charged that U.S. commanders in Afghanistan “have been lying for years, because they want to keep these wars going.”
This is the first time political candidates have suggested that the interests of senior military officials played a key part in prolonging the war in Afghanistan. The idea that national security institutions and their leaders pursue such parochial interests has been almost entirely ignored in past discussions, because mainstream foreign policy specialists have disapproved of it.
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But Morton Halperin, who was a senior official at the Pentagon and on the White House National Security Council staff in four different administrations, beginning President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, documented the existence of such institutional interests as a fact of political life in his classic book “Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy,” the second edition of which was published in 2006.
Halperin identified the three kinds of interests that shape the positions taken by government institutions on national security issues: 1) budgetary resources, 2) the missions and capabilities defining their institutional identities, and 3) their internal staff morale. Using this frame can go a long way toward explaining the decisions made by the military services and the Pentagon over the last 20 years.
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The troop withdrawal from Iraq made the continued U.S. counterinsurgency war against the Taliban the Army’s primary mission. A 2009 Pentagon plan for restructuring the military budget around a “counterinsurgency” mission to justify a 14 percent increase in military spending was based on the assumption that U.S. forces, including the Army, would be deployed around the world in “stability operations” for the foreseeable future. But that plan for increased spending had originally assumed a semi-permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq and a smaller long-term presence in Afghanistan.
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As the U.S. troop presence in Iraq wound down, the Army’s role in Afghanistan became emblematic of its new mission and the rationale for continued high levels of budgetary support. Consequently, during and after the U.S. troop surge of 2009–2011, it proved impossible for the commander in Afghanistan to come up with accurate metrics that would show any real progress against the Taliban, as an NSC official later admitted. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war,” the NSC official said in a confidential interview made public by the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers in December 2019.
The use of phony metrics to sell the war was not new to cynical enlisted men in Afghanistan. They considered it one of the main features of what they called a “self-licking ice cream cone” or “SLICC”, which a popular glossary of military slang defined as any program that “appears to exist in order to justify its existence and produces irrelevant indicators of success.”
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The third primary institutional interest — internal institutional morale —was also well-served by the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, especially with regard to the officer corps of the Army, which dominated the U.S. military footprint. That was accomplished by rotating a large number of officers through the war for relatively brief periods, which meant that more of them could be promoted to higher ranks. This resulted in the U.S. Army having more four-star generals on active duty by 2020 than at any time since April 1945. As candidate Joe Kent put it succinctly, “Wars are good for generals. This is how they make their rank.”
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The historical circumstances surrounding the decision to plunge ahead with war in Afghanistan and the deceptions used to support that decision, indicate that Halperin’s analysis of the three kinds of institutional interests that motivate policy can and should be used more widely for analyzing national security policy. That analytical approach can provide a more realistic understanding of what has driven other historical and contemporary national security policies — and how they can best be challenged.
This is why Joe Biden had but to pull out abruptly. The US Army would have sabotaged any other effort, because having any conditions, or a less aggressive timetable, would have guaranteed efforts by general officers to manufacture a crisis to prevent the withdrawal.
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