The mess in which our nation finds itself in Afghanistan illustrates a fundamental economic concept, that of ‘opportunity cost.’
This idea, often expressed as “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” reflects the fact that in a world of scarce resources, choosing to produce or buy one product inevitably means that you cannot make or consume some other one. That applies even when no money is involved.
Economics is about choices made in allocating resources, whether running a company, buying household items or in myriad other contexts.
That is especially true in military operations. Commanders cannot place a monetary value on the lives of their troops, and there was no way to calculate the value of defeating Japan or Germany in World War II. But military commanders face even harsher constraints of opportunity cost than any civilian producer of consumer goods.
Historian Barbara Tuchman didn’t use the term “opportunity cost,” but “The Guns of August,” her classic history of the outbreak of World War I, centers on a momentous example of an erroneous estimation of opportunity costs.
The Germans knew they had to fight the Russians on their eastern border and the French to their west. They did not have enough forces to attack both at once. They chose a strategy of a temporary delaying action against the Russians so they could concentrate the bulk of their forces on an aggressive drive through Belgium into France.
They hoped to repeat the success they’d had 44 years earlier in the Franco-Prussian War, when they defeated France militarily in six weeks even though that war didn’t end formally for months.
But, as Tuchman recounts in the elegant prose that kept her book on the New York Times bestseller list for 42 weeks, the German command gave in to fear when the initial Russian advance seemed stronger than anticipated. They pulled two army corps, more than 50,000 men, away from the Western Front to reinforce the east.
Ironically, by the time these troops arrived in East Prussia, the Russian advance had been crushed. But when French and British forces, after a solid month of bloody defeats and retreats, counterattacked on the Marne River north of Paris, the German troops were crucially absent. The German advance stalled and the war became the static trench fighting that prevailed until Germany and Austria threw in the towel four bloody years later.
The Germans made the mistake of assuming that they had success in the bag on the Western Front and could allocate military resources elsewhere. That is precisely the mistake the Bush administration made in 2002 when, after having routed the Taliban government from power in Afghanistan, it decided to take a break from the war on terror and oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The opportunity cost of concentrating military and nation-building resources on Iraq was that Afghanistan festered, the Taliban regrouped and in Afghanistan, the government wobbled aimlessly. Now, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, and other officials candidly admit, the situation in Afghanistan is highly discouraging. Seven wasted years have made the establishment of a successful government friendly to the United States problematic, indeed.
There is no way to place a dollar value on the benefits of deposing a dictator like Saddam or on the long-term costs of an Afghanistan, and perhaps a Pakistan, ruled by bitter enemies of our country. But I’ll bet my money that future historians will judge the trade-off chosen by the United States in 2002 as bad a decision as that made by the Germans 88 years earlier.
© 2009 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.