War Handwavium

Time has an interesting article.

The war in Afghanistan has killed 707 Americans so far and is currently costing the US 4 billion dollars a month.

It might actually be cheaper to simply buy off the taliban and pay them to do something besides fight.

a new report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week says U.S. commanders commonly refer to the “$10 Taliban” — alluding to the amount insurgents earn each day from Taliban coffers swelled by drug proceeds and Islamist benefactors. That’s more than an Afghan cop makes. “They can collect double or triple pay for planting an improvised explosive device,” the report adds. So how many fighters are on the Taliban payroll? Earlier this year during a visit to Washington, Mohammad Hanif Atmar, Afghanistan’s Interior Minister, estimated there are between 10,000 and 15,000 Taliban fighting his government and its U.S. allies.

$10 a day times 30 days is salary of $300 a month. If the Taliban is currently funding 10,000 fighters, that would be $3,000,000 a month. THREE MILLION dollars a month. The US is currently spend FOUR BILLION dollars a month.

What we spend in one month in Afghanistan would pay the Taliban a thousand times over. That means we could pay all the existing taliban for a thousand months (a hundred years) with what we spend on just one month in Afghanistan.

Alexander the Great, in all his conquests, never conquered Afghanistan. He bribed his way through it.

We might want to seriously consider following in Alexander the Great’s footsteps. Instead of tripling the US presence in the Graveyard of Empires, instead of trying to conquer the land that the Soviet Union at the height of its power could not conquer, we might want to consider smarter alternatives to victory.

The population of Afghanistan is 28 million people. Half live below poverty level. Unemployment is %40. About half the population suffer from shortages of housing, clean drinking water, and electricity. Is this a land that must be “conquered” to achieve our goals?

What exactly are our goals? Does anyone even know?

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1916521,00.html