Is there any way to look at the war in Afghanistan as anything but a mounting failure? We have been there for about 10 years and we have learned that the death of each Taliban fighter we battle costs at least $50 million. That's a conservative estimate. It could actually be $100 million.
The best estimate of Taliban killed annually by coalition forces is roughly 2,000. The direct cost to the Pentagon of waging war in Afghanistan for 2010 is about $100 billion. Indirect costs are approximately another $100 billion.
One has to simply divide one number into the other, that calculation reveals that $100 million is being spent to kill each Taliban solider.
If you cut the estimate in half by doubling the number of slain fighters to 4,000, even though this is highly unlikely. So, under the lower estimate, the cost to the American taxpayer to kill 20 individual Taliban members, my friends, is a breath-taking $1 billion.
We've been at this for over 10 years, so killing an estimated 35,000 Taliban fighting our peace-keepers/occupation would cost $1.75 trillion. Our generals say a military victory is not in the cards. But we must stay until the job is done.
I say, What job? Are we to magically transform that country and it's people into a facsimile of American democracy? Only a child, a simpleton or a foreign policy intellectual could possibly believe this one.
What about the emancipation of the Afghan women? That's a fantasy. The ethic of that tribal culture in that part of the world is rooted in the roles the opposite sexes are assigned.
And ethics are the rules of survival for any coherent group. On that, they will not yield.
Our massive, expensively equipped armed forces, flush with technology that boggles the mind, are wholly inadequate to the task of fighting wars like this. We can kill people from the sky with the Hellfire missiles launched from pilotless drones until the cows come home, but such tactics won't win this kind of war. Our generals have already told us as much.
Around the globe since World War Two there has been new forms of warfare that have erupted. Guerilla armies, bandits and terrorists have developed tactics that have brought an end to conventional war as we have known it for more than two centuries.
Vietnam, Algeria, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflicts have ushered in major change in the ways wars are fought now. We are now seeing that play out in a land that has time and again evicted its conquerors. We are Gulliver, and the Lilliputians have tied us down. The trick is to recognize this, and then somehow loosen the bonds and leave this habitat. Have we the leaders wise enough to do this? Not Yet!
All comments are more then welcome on this page. Thank You.
Rev.John.